Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson

On Wednesday the 14^th we met at Marcia’s smartly decorated home.  There were Christmas decorations tucked in corners and on shelves all intermingling beautifully with her antiques and collector items.  While the classy holiday atmosphere filled our visual senses, our hostess filled our stomachs with hot stuffed chicken served on a bed of wild rice and mushroom gravy, and a broccoli and cauliflower salad.  Our dessert offerings were a pecan shortbread and in the spirit of our book’s theme, the Forgotten Cookies.  We also sampled some of the homemade peanut brittle JoAnn so graciously gifted each of us.  It was noted that the Fiction Addiction Bookclub ladies have now been together for two years.  What a fun time we have had and what a lot of books we have read!  And so I lift a glass of holiday cheer and offer a toast to my fellow bibliophiles and dear friends, “May your spine be strong, your pages many, your storyline scintillating and may you live happily ever after!”

 Before we parted we stopped to pose in front of Marcia’s sparkling Christmas tree.

Synopsis:

Christine Lucas suffered a tragic accident twenty years earlier which damaged her capacity to retain her memory.  As an amnesiac, once Christine goes to sleep at night, her memory is erased and when she awakes in the morning she is always shocked to find that she is married and 47 years old.  In her mind, Christine believes herself to still be in her twenties or younger.  Her husband, Ben, patiently explains things to her each morning helping her to adjust to the reality of her current life.  Or is it truly her reality?  With the help of her journal, Christine begins to recover lost memories and unravel the mysteries surrounding her current life.

Comments:
This storyline was reminiscent of the movie 50 First Dates with Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, but without the comedic relief.  Another FAB member remarked that this book was the woman’s version of the movie Fatal Attraction. 

We liked that the story was interesting enough to hook us in from the beginning and keep us reading as we tried to solve the mystery along with Christine.  Although not a deep, thought-provoking story, it still managed to keep the final mystery a secret from all of us until the end.  However, we did have some questions about some of the plot.  How come no other doctors ever suggested the journaling idea during her twenty years of being under the daily care of medical professionals?  And would a single man really have stuck around for 20 years waiting for his chance to be with a woman who is already married and has no recollection of him?  We also questioned the reality of Christine being able to meet with Dr. Nash without being detected.  And so for some of us there was the nagging thought as we were reading that this was just too unrealistic.

We did find a commonality with Christine when she spoke about being shocked each morning to see how she had aged.  Despite none of us having amnesia, we find it difficult at times to adjust the image of how we look in our mind’s eye to what our mirrors reflect back at us!  “I reach for the soap, but something is wrong…The hand gripping the soap does not look like mine.  Its skin is wrinkled…The face I see looking back at me is not my own….the skin on the cheeks and under the chin sags; the lips are thin; the mouth turned down.” (Christine on page 8).  We laughed along with Brenda when she shared that she looks in the mirror and says, “That’s not my face!  That’s my mother’s face!”  We also confessed that we understood the disappointment Christine felt in the following quote:  “A young man wearing jeans and a T-shirt comes in and glances over to where we sit, before ordering a drink and settling at a table with the newspaper.  He does not look up at me again, and the twenty-year old me is upset.  I feel as though I am invisible.”  (p. 26)


Most Memorable Quote:
“I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it.  No treasure house of recollection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on.  What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?” p. 115

FAB Rating:

*** ½ (3-1/2 stars out of 5)
It was a good first book for a new author.  The plot hooked you and made you want to keep reading.  It was amazing when we went back and figured out that the elapsed time was actually just one day as Christine re-read her 3 week old journal.