What if you had the chance to do-over the last ten years of your life? That is the chance Alice Love gets after falling in spin class at her gym and misplaces a decade of her life. Ten years ago, Alice was twenty-nine, crazily in love with her husband, and expecting her first child. Certainly not a regular at the gym. But now she has three children and is nearly divorced from her husband, living the life of a exercise obsessed and expensively dressed modern mom. British author Liane Moriarty explores what a person would do, given the chance to erase the past and start over, in What Alice Forgot, published in 2009. After her bump on the head, Alice’s memory doesn’t come back. At least not right away, and not all at once. This gives the reader the time to dive deep into Alice’s life and relationships and learn along the way what strayed Alice from the path of a free-spirited young woman to the nearly middle aged control freak she is. In addition to an estranged husband Alice has also nearly wrecked her relationship with her sister Elizabeth. Throughout the story are also sprinkled diary entries from Elizabeth and blog entries from Alice’s grandmother Frannie. When Alice’s memories do return, she has the task of combining the old Alice with the new one to find balance, and hopefully reconciliation, with her life and family.
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