Sean Wilson’s short but searching exploration of dementia opens as Grace, an elderly widow, walks down the middle of a busy road. This episode reveals the ways in which Grace’s world can be both deeply disorienting and uncannily beautiful: she mistakes the headlights of cars for torches carried by “children, hand in hand, running at an impossible speed”. This near miss leads her daughter Liz to place her mother in a nursing home, where Grace struggles to come to terms with her new living circumstances.
Wilson’s decision to show us Grace in many forms and moments of time is what sets You Must Remember This apart: we see her not only as an elderly woman, but also as a girl, a daughter, a teenager, a mother and a wife. It’s a detailed portrait, made all the more complex by Wilson’s use of flashbacks; every part of Grace’s life we see comes in the form of a memory that she experiences as the present. These past and present threads weave together melancholy, longing, regret, sadness – but also happiness and joy: “The things she remembers seem to find her more than she finds them. They come to her in pieces, like pages cut from a book and scattered in the wind.”
The access we get to Grace’s interior state is beautiful, intimate and terrifying. The daily symptoms of her disease allow Wilson to use flashbacks in a way that isn’t intrusive, for the past is also Grace’s present. You Must Remember This is at once a novel about dementia, but also memory.
Grace’s state of being frustrates and alienates Liz, who constantly battles to get through to her mother. Only rarely do they connect. “We’ve got to look on the bright side, Mum. We’ve got to keep moving forward, that’s the important thing. Keep our spirits up,” she tells Grace, who muses: “What a strange word. Spirits. The word seems to ring in her mind, repeating over and over, crowding her thoughts and pushing out all others until it’s replaced by a sound.”
I’ve never read a novel entirely focused on dementia. To his credit, Wilson doesn’t look away from the reality of something that affects the lives of millions around the world and it makes for a harrowing read. We feel Grace’s frustration, her disorientation. Sounds, in particular, seem to create confusion in her. Time and again, different contexts clash – something someone says to Grace in the present links with something she is thinking about the past.
At first, I found the discontinuous numbering of the chapters to be a kind of challenge to the reader – starting with chapter 10, then seven, 11, 12, eight, one, and so on. Was I supposed to reorder a fractured, scattered collection of memories? As the novel progressed, I gave up on trying. But Wilson is showing us Grace’s confusion – the order of events isn’t important.
Much of the book touches on Grace’s difficult childhood and adolescence, particularly the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. Initially, I struggled to understand the significance of Grace’s early life in shaping her present. There’s also an uneasy balance between the two major “scenes” of this story; Grace’s dementia defines her present, but she’s also deeply troubled by the past, and I wanted to know more about it.
Wilson’s writing is often hauntingly beautiful and at its best when he deploys metaphors to immerse us in Grace’s experience. “Some days, yesterday is bright and full of colour, a picture in detail, tiny brushstrokes laid one beside the other. On other days, yesterday is like […] Big canvases with splashes of colour moving in all directions.”
Despite the sadness at the core of You Must Remember This, there are moments of tenderness in this novel. Wilson has taken on a challenging subject and, while not a resounding success, this book is a valuable, eye-opening contribution to the literature of dementia.
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson is published by Affirm Press ($24.99)
