Free Press © 2008, 263 pages

It’s no astonishment that Jill Price has become the go-to girl in her family for reminders about birthdays and anniversaries: she’s incapable of forgetting them. Given a date from 1980 on–her memory before she was fourteen is spottier–she can rattle off a laundry list of her activities on that day and provide headline news as well, provided she was aware of the event at the time. Her memory works in reverse, too: given an event, she can tell you its date and significance in her own life. Her extraordinary memory is limited to the autobiographical, however. She is not one of those savants who can memorize long lists of prime numbers or the worth of pi to hundreds of places. And in fact her aptitude for rote memorization of that sort is relatively poor, which proved problematic for her in school.

In her autobiography, Price discusses, but only superficially, memory-related scientific research in general and the tests that have been conducted on her own memory. (She was the subject of a paper published in the scientific journal Neurocase.) But mostly she tells us the story of her life with an emphasis on how her bizarre memory has kept her from living normally. The advantages of having a nearly perfect autobiographical memory are obvious: she can recollect with perfect clarity, for example, the giddy joy

she felt when she first met her husband. But the negatives are more numerous. Price can also remember, with perfect clarity, the conversation she had with doctors about allowing them to harvest her husband’s organs once he was taken off life support. Nor can she will herself not to recollect such things: Price’s memories come to her unbidden, replaying in her head in apparently random order. Moreover, when Price remembers she relives the emotion of the original experience. So deaths and slights and embarrassments and childhood terror are as painful and frightening and unhappy as they were originally. Interestingly, the intensity of Price’s relived emotion is sometimes evident on the page. In recalling painful episodes from her adolescence, Price’s voice is imbued with the resentments of a teenager toward her parents.

Price collaborated on her book with a writer, Bart Davis. The resulting narrative is a rapid read with a conversational tone. Unfortunately, the writing is bland and occasionally repetitive. This is a shame, because Price certainly has an interesting story to tell. Were it written in snappier prose, her book might have been–forgive me–unforgettable.

Tags: memory, book reviews, Jill Price, books, The Woman Who Can’t Forget