Memoir 'stranger than fiction'
Have you ever wondered if anyone really has the ‘who am I, where am I?’ amnesia you find in popular fiction? I explore my first-hand experience of retrograde amnesia in my memoir, All That I Forgot
By Anne Howell, author of All That I Forgot: a Memoir
Have you ever wondered if anyone really has the ‘who am I, where am I?’ amnesia you find in popular fiction? I explore my first-hand experience of retrograde amnesia in my memoir, All That I Forgot.
My encounter with amnesia began after complications from neurosurgery threw me into a three-day coma in 1991. I had been diagnosed with a defect on my outer brain, and surgery seemed my only hope. The surgery worked, but in the process I caught the deadly bug, meningitis.
I woke thinking the hospital room I lay in might be a spaceship. This had a certain logic as I felt I was about nine years old. Yet I turned out to be 31 and mother of a young child I didn’t recognise on first sight. Once taken home by a man I didn’t remember to raise our daughter – wishing there was a motherhood manual to help, not that that would assist as I couldn’t read – I began to investigate my missing past. Many walls blocked my way, often thrown up by those closest to me, my mother in particular. People were clearly withholding salient facts, but why?
I wrote All That I Forgot to invite readers to join me to revisit this peculiar experience, which people say reads as ‘stranger than fiction’.
Join Anne for the launch of All That I Forgot: a Memoir (Bad Apple Press) at 6pm on Friday, November 4 at Collins Booksellers Thirroul. Bookings essential via Collins Booksellers Thirroul: 4267 1408, thirroul@collinsbooks.com.au. There will be another launch at Sydney’s Gleebooks on November 10 at 6pm.
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