What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty

2011, 432 page

29 years old Alice is happily married to Nick and they are expecting their first child. One day she wakes up after apparently hitting her head, and she finds out that 10 years has passed since her last memory, 10 years that were completely erased from her head. And it seems like her life went in a completely different direction than where she thought they will when she was 29. Some of the changes seem blessed - she is thinner, wearing elegant cloths in size Small, her belly is flat and muscular and it seems like she spends many hours at the gym. She has three children. Her house looks exactly what she always dreamed it will, and even more. She is not that shy insecure woman anymore, apparently she does all kind of public activities and even hosts parties at her home, could you believe that. But she finds out that other aspects of her life, that seemed so safe and stable, also changed, and not for good. Mostly, she just can't believe and she and Nick are getting a divorce. How could that be? They love each other so much, they are so right for each other. They complete each other. She starts a journey to understand what happened, what went so wrong, and who is Gina whose name comes up again and again every time she tries to make sense of these overwhelming new facts she has to learn about her life.
What are the important things Alice forgot? Are these those 10 years of her life that vanished with the bump on her head? Or maybe these are those things she knew at the age of 29, that somehow the daily routine and the unexpected events during the last 10 years made her abandon and forget, and now young Alice is here to remind her? The answer is not clear to the end of the book, and also the mystery of what exactly happened and why. I was completely fascinated by Alice's story, and laughed and cried with her, and I so hoped that the book will end up the way I wanted it to. The book is a light read but it handles the everyday items and builds up our lives - marriage life, the changes with the birth of the kids, the hard work of raising kids and the consequences of lack of sleep that is hard to imagine before getting to this stage, spending most of the time on career on account of family time and its consequences, all these things that happen to us and we don't pay attention to their huge consequences sometimes until it is too late.
I give a big recommendation to this book.