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Book: What Alice Forgot
Challenge: GISH II
Team: I Plead the Fifth (Team 5)



Imagine losing the most important ten years of your life �

Alice is twenty-nine. She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house. She’s newly engaged to the wonderful Nick and is pregnant with her first baby.

There’s just one problem.
All that was ten years ago �

Alice has slipped in a step aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade. Now she’s a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn’t speaking to her. This is her life but not as she knows it.

Clearly Alice has made some terrible mistakes.
Just how much can happen in a decade?

Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?

Discussion Questions

1. Did you like the younger Alice best? Or did you relate more to the older Alice?

2. What would your younger self of ten years ago think of the person you are today?

3. What would surprise your younger self most about the life you’re currently leading? What would disappoint you?

4. What would you think of your children? Are they how you imagined they would be? Are you the parent you envisioned? Why or why not?

5. Alice is shocked by many transformations—her gym-toned body, her clothes, her house. Are you more or less polished than you were a decade ago? And do you think there’s any deeper significance to such change?

6. Do you think it was realistic that Alice ended up back with Nick? Were you happy with that ending? Do you think they would have ended up together if she hadn’t lost her memory?

7. In order for Nick to be successful at his job, was it inevitable that he would spend less time with his family and thereby grow apart from Alice?

8. How did you feel about the sections written from the perspectives of Elisabeth and Frannie? Did they add to your enjoyment of the book, or would you have preferred to have it written entirely from Alice’s point of view?

9. Do you think it was unavoidable that Elisabeth and Alice had grown apart, because of the tension caused by Elisabeth’s infertility versus Alice’s growing family? Or do you think their rift had more to do with the kind of people both of them had become?

10. It’s not only Alice who changed over the last decade. Elisabeth changed, too. Do you think she would have been so accepting of the new Alice at the end if she herself didn’t get pregnant?

11. Out of all the characters in the book, who do you think had changed the most over the past decade and why?

12. The film rights to the book have been sold to Fox 2000—who do you think would be good in the lead roles?

13. If you were to write a letter to your future self to be opened in ten years, what would you say?

I am planning on starting this today because I will be travelling for the rest of the week starting Tuesday into next Tuesday - so will likely finish it before I fly, so I can pen my thoughts as I go.

Right off the bat, I am intrigued.
This is my third Liane Moriarty book (after The Husband's Secret and Truly Madly Guilty) - and I remember finding her prose pretty smooth in both of them, which is exactly how this started.

Read upto Chapter 12 - roughly third of the way through.

I loved the premise of the book. I wonder how I would react if suddenly one day I wake up and find myself missing any memory of the last 10 years! It is indeed interesting to read through Alice's struggle and I thought it was pretty well done.

The start has some humor in it and I wanted that to be interspersed and a little more because the situation that we find Alice in really lends to a lot of humorous situations. Her mother, Barb, though is particularly a character! Haha! Loved her short stint so far. And boy imagine waking up and being told that in the time that you don't remember, (view spoiler)[ your mother married your husband's father (hide spoiler)], that can surely throw someone in a tailspin. :P

The random breaks from Elisabeth's perspective took me a little getting used to, but I feel for her story. The struggle with (view spoiler)[ losing a child (hide spoiler)] is real and I can only imagine the pain she is fighting through. (view spoiler)[ She likes kids, but can't have them - and Alice has kids, but can't remember them! (hide spoiler)] Quite a conundrum!

Things have started to move along a bit now which is great, because the story had began to stall a bit, so hopefully we get to dive deep into these character and how this one thing impacts their lives, individually and together.

Read upto Chapter 26, about 70% through.

Not going to lie, the pacing of the book is not working for me. Its getting a bit repetitive and the story isn't necessarily moving in any particular direction for me at this point. There isn't a whole lot to the plot, but the characters are also a little dull. I actually like Elisabeth's story a lot more than the MC Alice's. And now suddenly we have Franny's perspective thrown in - not sure what that is achieving to be honest.

I was also expecting the whole Alice meeting with children and with Nick situation to be a lot more stirring than it was. There was so much there that could have been tapped into, but also 3/4th of the book in and I am at a loss as to where it is headed.

There are wonderful moments in between, so there is substance there - so I hope the last quarter raises the bar much higher than it has been so far.

I'm through chapter 8, so I tried not to read too much of your second comment. This is my fifth Liane Moriarty book - my favorite of hers is Big Little Lies, so check that one out. I have not readThe Husband's Secret, but I think that is supposed to be one of her betters ones too. I remember liking Truly Madly Guilty. I also remember not being super impressed by Nine Perfect Strangers or Apples Never Fall. They were good, but not great.

I've gotten a slow start on the book - I drove all day Tuesday then was wiped out Wednesday. So I'm playing catch up now....but luckily I had lots of errands to run today and was able to listen while doing that to make sure we could get the prompt!

I'm liking it. It is an interesting concept to wake up and have lost a decade. My heart is breaking for her a little bit. It seems like her relationships with both her sister and her husband (soon to be ex-husband?) are not where she thought they would be. I'm guessing from the fact that the Alice from 10 years ago finds it inconceivable that she wouldn't have supported her sister more and that she and her husband wouldn't have figured a way to work things out, will help all of them return to the goals of their earlier selves. Therefore I'm imagining (hoping for?) a happy ending. Without all the experiences that may have soured her disposition, she'll be able to fight for what she once wanted.

The question is will this be enough? Will Nick be able to forget all the things they've been through and return to where they were 10 years ago? Will Elizabeth? And will Alice be able to as well once she remembers the last 10 years (I'm assuming she will by the end of the book, but that is yet to be determined as well)?

A woman's name was mentioned at the end of one of the chapters, which led me to think Nick might have had an affair. That would be hard to forgive...so it will be interesting to see if there can be a happy ending and if so, will I be able to believe it once all the facts are known.

This book has also led me to wonder if I would be a better person today if I could forget the last 10 years of my life? I don't know that I would be a better person, but I do think I would be more optimistic about what the future holds. There are some things that happen in life that are hard to forget once they've occurred. And once each decade is lived you no longer have possibilities, but realities.

I'm finished now. I read your post where you were ~70% done when I was about 70% done. I've been trying to decide if I feel the same way about the pacing. I admit I was having some difficulty with the book still at this point - so maybe it was the pacing and it was the book that really wasn't drawing me in like I expected it to, but I was also still struggling with returning to real life tasks/routines after my long drive home on Tuesday (and dreading returning to work). So I assumed it was me that was the problem, but maybe it was the book and the pacing!

I agree with the segments on Elizabeth and Frannie. The first time I heard either of them was while I was listening to the book (while running errands!) and I was needing to re-read (re-listen) to chapters because I thought I missed things. There was no transition while you were listening to the book to signal what was happening. I felt like they need a chime or something to signal the change. Once I switched to reading the eBook I figured out what was going on as whenever those sections occurred the words switched to italics so you had more of a visual clue that you were changing perspectives.

In the end I liked the different perspectives on loss and the messages that went along with them...Frannie thinking to Elizabeth 'hey you may not get a baby, but you did get a husband - you should enjoy that'; Elizabeth being jealous of not having kids like Alice, but also coming around to realize that she was allowing this loss to dominate/ruin her life/marriage; Alice realizing she has the perfect family, but she's somehow losing her marriage; even Barb - she lost her husband but found love again and it really seemed to have turned her life around so she seemed to be demonstrating to the other three that you can recover from loss, even if it takes a while, even if you've made mistakes and not handled that loss in the best way.

I do feel like the book improved after the 70% mark - hopefully you did too. I liked that Alice and Nick had a chance to "try again" before her memories returned so they had had some conversations that weren't biased by all the things that had happened in the last 10 years. I thought it was probably realistic that she went back with Dominick initially when her memories returned (side note: I thought it was a bit weird that the author gave the boyfriend the name Dominick as that name can be shorted to 'Nick" the same as her husband), but I was glad in the end that she ended up with Nick and their family. It was interesting that Alice and Nick both identified completely different moments as the time when they each realized there marriage could work again - kind of reinforcing that everyone's memories of the same events can be totally different.

I also thought the Gina story and why their marriage was falling apart was believable in the end. When things first starting being mentioned, I thought Gina and Nick must have had an affair just like Alice first thought. But when it turned out that Alice and Gina were best friends and Gina had died, I wasn't quite sure how that could have contributed to Alice and Nick's marriage declining. But I can see how Nick pulling away because his job was busy left a void for Alice and she filled it with Gina. But then Nick found that Alice's friendship with Gina was overshadowing their marriage, and all the fights that could ensue about that, etc.

I am curious to know if you liked The Husband's Secret more or less than What Alice Forgot.....I still think that one should be on my TBR even though I was kind of "meh" on a couple of her other books.