LIT LISTS: Eight novels about memory loss

Friday, January 5, 2024

Eight novels about memory loss

Emily Schultz is the author of Sleeping With Friends and the forthcoming, Brooklyn Kills Me. She is the co-founder of Joyland Magazine. Her last novel,

Little Threats, was named an Apple Books Best of 2020 pick. Her novel, The Blondes, was named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Kirkus. The Blondes was produced as a scripted podcast starring Madeline Zima (Twin Peaks), and created by Schultz and Brian J Davis. Translated into French, German, and Spanish it had over one million listeners worldwide.

At Electric Lit Schultz tagged eight novels that "begin with the idea that memory loss could be something more than the act of forgetting. Each of these books take a risk, and offer something original, strange, and fantastic." One title on the list:

In the Woods by Tana French

Gripping from the first word, Tana French has become known as a mystery maven for a reason. In this first book of her Dublin Murder Squad series, we begin by being taken into the narrator’s confidence about what he cannot trust of memory. We’re then launched into a precise police-report style recounting of a crime from 1984 of missing children in the woods near Knocknaree. It turns out our detective, Rob Ryan, is actually one of the victims—the one left alive. Trauma has taken his memories of that event. Rob now works as an investigator, so this is a double-case narrative. A 12-year-old girl has gone missing from the same woods, and he has to solve it—while also combing through his own traumatic past.