Remind Me Who I Am, Again Book

At the beginning of the nineties Linda Grant's mother, Rose, became forgetful, frequently repeating the same question again and again: not because she couldn't remember the answer but because she could not recall having asked one, even seconds ago. In 1993 she was diagnosed with Multi-Infaret Dementia. It wasn't Alzheimer's disease but it would one day reach the same place, that lonely planet where those without memory live.

In Remind Me Who I Am, Again Linda Grant looks at the profound questions of identity, memoir and autonomy that dementia raises. Along with Rose's memory, a whole world was in the process of being lost forever. Growing up as they did in a Jewish immigrant family reborn for the twentieth century, a conspiracy of liars and tall-storytellers, Rose's children were now almost cut off from the truth about their extraordinary, wayward family - their father's day in 1920's New York as Harry Houdini's house guest, his beautiful doomed daughter from an earlier marriage, even his real name.

Does she know you? kind friends ask. But have Rose's children ever really known her? Remind Me Who I Am, Again is the story of a disease, the workings of the mind and a quest to reconstruct the past. Most of all it is a daughter's attempt to answer the question 'Do any of us really know our parents?

Publishers Weekly

Grant first charted her mother's decline into senile dementia in an article for the Guardian (U.K.). In response to a flood of readers' letters and her own need to examine her extended family history, she expanded that article into this moving account of second-generation Anglo-Jewry, published last year in England. Dual themes of memory and identity underlie the sad account of her mother's illness, which also becomes a metaphor for the lost history of an immigrant family. The family's roots in Eastern Europe were effectively destroyed, not only by the Holocaust but also by the family's desire to remember selectively, and not always truthfully, the story of its past. As a child, Grant thought family stories a bore; now she regrets her lack of interest and lost opportunities to know more about her parents. She chronicles her mother's decline with unflinching honesty, revealing her guilt and impatience with her mother's condition and her failings as a daughter. With nostalgic humor, she looks back on the experiences of her large, extended family of observant Jews who settled in a country where anti-Semitism, while not as virulent as in the Poland they had left, was not unknown. As her mother's condition deteriorates, Grant and her sister come to the painful decision to place her in a nursing home. While there is no upbeat ending to Grant's story, she affirms that people can react with dignity and sensitivity to the inevitable tragedies of old age. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|