"The Garden of Lost Remembering is dedicated to all those whom I will never forget even when I won't always be able to remember their names."
Memories are tricky. You can’t really trust them. Things only get worse as you get older.
What if the memory is of something that happened more than ninety years ago? When does a memory that won’t leave you alone become a haunting? Who is the tearfully pleading child whose voice she hears time and time again?
The young volunteer on a reminiscence project is slowly drawn into the ever changing and uncertain world of the woman he visits.
At first he is fascinated by the quirky and quixotic view of the previous century seen through the eyes of this former journalist. He struggles with her bewildering preoccupation with ideas of consciousness and self and the role that memory might play.
He has to work hard to keep up with the peppering of episodes that have abandoned any sense of linearity in time in the lottery of her lucidity.
Slowly her concern with what she thought she saw becomes his obsession, gradually submerging him in her world till neither of them is any longer sure if he is from her past or present, is a fiction or an aspect of a psychosis. The synopsis of a dream is another dream, of a scream another scream.
You can’t turn off memories as you can a life support machine.
She once wrote ‘Death makes everything else too late except justice’. It’s just that some days, she can’t quite remember writing that.