I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (35 page)

Dan would like to thank Beth Homan at Montgomery College, who knew a story when she saw one; Nick Anderson, his friend and longtime editor, who shepherded the Su Meck story onto the front page; Vernon Loeb, who immediately spotted its book potential; Craig Timberg and Chris Davenport, his
Post
colleagues and friends, who helped explain the whole “book” thing and lent us their agents; Rafael Sagalyn and Gillian MacKenzie, the agents, who provided invaluable advice; Jenna Johnson, Valerie Strauss, Bill Turque, Jay Mathews, Michael Alison Chandler, Emma Brown, Donna St. George, and the rest of the current and former
Post
education team, an ensemble with talent to burn; Freddy Kunkle, Craig Singer, John Kelly, Tim Brennan, Chuck Dolan, Skip Sheffield, John Grogan, Neil Santaniello, Bob McCabe, and everyone at GPJams, always ready for another set; Steve Hendrix, Tracy Liden, and Erika Singer, who provided timely guidance in shaping the proposal; Megan Brooks and Wendell Watson at Texas
Health, who helped us find the crucial medical records; Michael Yassa at Johns Hopkins, Daniel Schacter at Harvard, and Larry Squire at UC San Diego, who taught us how memory works; Su’s devoted family and friends, who walked us through the missing years; Molly Lindley and Jonathan Karp at Simon & Schuster, who tirelessly, thoughtfully shaped a manuscript into a book; and Su and Jim, the sources who became collaborators and friends. Dan would also like to thank Betty de Visé, his ever-devoted mother; Madeleine and Donovan, his perfect children; and Sophie, his beautiful wife, editor, spiritual advisor and soul mate.

Simon & Schuster
Reading Group Guide

I Forgot to Remember

BY
S
U
M
ECK

At twenty-two, Su Meck was married with two children when a ceiling fan fell and struck her on the head. She survived the injury, but when she regained consciousness in the hospital, she didn’t know her own name, didn’t recognize a single family member or friend, couldn’t read or write or brush her teeth or use a fork—and she had no memories of her life. No one had any idea how bad her memory loss really was, and after only three weeks she was sent back into the world to raise her children and run a household, even though she had no idea how to do any of it. For more than twenty years, Su wrestled not only with questions of who she really was and who she wanted to be but how to simply get by day by day.
I Forgot to Remember
is the story of a woman who had to grow up all over again and finally take control of the strange second life she had awoken to.

Discussion Questions

1. 
A memoir by a woman with no memories is a strange concept, but how different is it from other memoirs, which tend to be pulled together from long-ago memories? Do you trust Su’s story more—as it’s been pieced together from many sources—or less than you would a memoir by another writer? What does your answer say about the nature of the genre?

2. 
Su talks about the difficulties of parenting with no memories of being parented. In what ways are we all reliant on the parenting skills we’ve been taught? Do the roles her children take on in reaction to her needs support your answer?

3. 
After the accident, Su relies on routines to make her days make sense. How much do you rely on routines to structure your life? If your routines were taken away, would you be as confused as Su? Why or why not?

4. 
One of the more frustrating experiences for Su was when people believed her memory loss stemmed from psychological, not physical, sources. Do you think it matters what caused it? How might its cause change your perception of Su’s injuries and the difficulties she faces?

5. 
“I think I was probably trying to prove how genuine I really was, somehow. Because inside I felt so much like a fraud.” Do you think all of us do this on some level? Why or why not?

6. 
How reliable of a narrator do you think Su is? Do you find it problematic that Jim gets so many basic facts about her accident wrong? What about the memories of the other people, such as her kids? How much do you trust their memories? How does it affect your reading?

7. 
In what ways do the various settings—the tract house in Texas, the homes in suburban Maryland, the deluxe but stifling hotel in Egypt—shape the events that took place there and how we understand them?

8. 
Su has no memories of her life before the accident and very few of the years that immediately followed. She is dependent on other people’s memories of what happened to understand her own life. How different is this from the way the rest of us live? Are we all, in some way, a reflection of other people’s ideas about us? Why or why not?

9. 
Jim is one of the more complicated people in the book. In some ways, he comes off as a saint, helping and teaching and loving Su. On the other hand, he is largely absent, is verbally and physically abusive, and cheats on her. Do you ultimately see more good than bad in Jim? Why or why not? What do you make of the fact that Su loves him anyway?

10. 
“I have always loved Jim, and I have never loved Jim. In a way, Jim was assigned to me. I never really had a say.” How much do we choose who we love? How much of it do you think is circumstance?

11. 
After Su finds out Jim has had multiple affairs and spent tens of thousands of dollars on other women, things are rough between them, but she ultimately forgives him. Why do you think she did? Did she have any other choice? Do you think it shows weakness or strength on her part? Would you have forgiven Jim?

12. 
Toward the end of the book, Su finds out that she had an old boyfriend named Neal, a man her friends and family assure her was her first love. She has no memory of him, but then she remembers that there was a time when she didn’t remember or love her husband or children either. “And yet the expectation, and eventually the reality, was that I loved all of these people.” What does this say about the nature of love? Do you believe love must be immediate, or can it grow over time? Is romantic love different than maternal love? Do we choose love, or does it choose us?

13. 
“If I didn’t have Jim, I wouldn’t have me.” In light of all Jim has put Su through, and in light of all he did for her, do you agree? Is Su who she is largely because of Jim? Do you think she would have become a different person if she had married Neal? How do the people we surround ourselves with shape who we become?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. 
Have each person in the group write down their memories of the happiest day of their life. What sorts of details do you remember? What would happen if you lost this memory?

2. 
Watch a movie about memory loss, such as
Memento
,
The Bourne Identity
,
50 First Dates
,
Mulholland Drive
, or
Spellbound
. How is memory loss portrayed differently in these movies than in this book?

3. 
Research one of the organizations that raises awareness of and money for traumatic brain injury, including the Brain Trauma Foundation (
https://www.braintrauma.org/
) and Nick Kot Charity for TBI (
http://www.nickkotcharitynfp.com/
). Could your group organize a bake sale or other fund-raiser to support these worthy causes?

A Conversation with Su Meck

In the introduction, you talk about the difficulty of writing a memoir with no memories of the first twenty-two years of your life. Did you find the process easier or harder than you imagined? Did you uncover things you didn’t expect?

Not that I ever imagined writing
any
of this, but I have to say that writing this book was
way
harder than I ever
could have
imagined. I do think maybe memoirs are the hardest kind of book to write, in general, because memoirs force writers to put
themselves
onto the page, warts and all. And being able to do that honestly and effectively is a real challenge, I would think, for anyone. This process was obviously made more difficult for me because I didn’t have a clear understanding of who I was, and even still am, in the first place. I explore this concept in the book, but I cannot even really begin to explain how problematic it was, and still is, having to depend so much on the varied, often contradictory, stories of others.

Yes, there were many unexpected things that were uncovered. The biggest of all is the degree to which my family and friends saw me as back to normal and pretty much fine—with just a few “memory issues”—simply because that’s what they
wanted
to see and believe. There were so many strange incidents that happened that were overlooked; so many odd remarks that I made that were ignored; tons of little quirks that I had that were simply disregarded over the years. And on the flip side, and just as astonishing, is the degree to which
I
was an actual accomplice to all of this. I have asked people—mostly Jim and my parents—numerous times over the past two years as I have been writing, “Didn’t you think it was weird that I said that? Or acted that way?” They will often laugh and then give me pretty much the same answer every time: “Well, we do
now
!” And then those same people will admit to me that they didn’t understand and realize all of the difficulties I was having.

I have gained a far greater appreciation for everything my kids have done for me through the years. That being said, I also feel guilty that I didn’t even ever realize their incredible efforts on my behalf all along. It must have been such a struggle for them at times. The dynamics of our family were clearly far from conventional, and yet Benjamin, Patrick, and Kassidy just accepted things the way they were and did what needed to be done.

Tell us about the process of writing this memoir. You mention in the book that you had trouble meeting deadlines because you find time difficult to keep straight in your mind. Dan de Visé, who wrote the initial article about you in
The
Washington Post
, helped with the research and writing. Was that an easy process? How collaboratively did you work?

I met Dan de Visé for the first time in the spring of 2011, when he came to our house to interview me for the
Washington Post
article. When I made the decision to attempt to write a book about my experiences, I was initially more than a little bit overwhelmed and daunted by the task, so I asked Dan if he would be willing to help me. Dan agreed, and our first task was to write a book proposal that would be sent around to several publishing houses to gauge interest. Dan came back to the house a few times that summer, and through our conversations, he collected various anecdotes that could be used for the book proposal. Neither Dan nor I had
ever
written a book proposal—I had never even
heard
of a book proposal—and we didn’t get too much guidance, so we were a bit like the blind leading the blind at first.

Then, Jim and I left Maryland late in August and moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, in order for me to start at Smith College in the fall. From that point on, Dan and I rarely spoke and I haven’t seen him in person since August 2011. He interviewed my parents, my sister Barb, and Neal at one point, and also spoke to Jim a few times when he had specific questions. But for the most part, aside from a handful of e-mails, we didn’t really collaborate at all. I did my thing, and Dan did his.

It had been my original plan to try to write for the book every day, seven days a week. But I found it extremely hard to work on my book on the days and weeks when I also had to write papers for my Smith College classes. For whatever reason, I couldn’t ever switch gears effectively between academic writing and the kind of writing I used when telling my story. Because of that limitation, great portions of the book came from hours and hours spent writing during my winter and spring breaks from school. And then additional large sections were written in Josten Library during the summer after my first year. Mostly because it was one place on campus that was quiet
and
had air-conditioning.

Do you think your friends and family will be surprised by some of what they read in this book? What do you hope their reaction will be?

I didn’t initially think who people that know me well, especially my family, would be shocked by what I had written. But when I e-mailed out copies of a nearly finished manuscript to my parents and my brothers and sisters, I got some surprising reactions. Some of my sister Barb’s comments: “How did you manage to survive this?” And “I want to cry at parts of your story and I can only be thankful that you don’t remember much of what happened during this time.” And then my brother Mark: “The whole story helps me to understand the context through which you were functioning. I (probably like everyone else) just assumed after a little while that you were fine. Thank you for helping me to understand the whole picture.”