BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP
By S.J. Watson
Doubleday. 366 pages. £12.99 (h/b)
ISBN 978 0 857 520 173
Christine had a traumatic accident when she was 29 and lost her memory.
What is more, every time she goes to sleep what she has learned about herself during the day is erased. Now she is 47, a woman who wakes up every morning astonished to find herself a middle-aged woman in bed with a husband she didn’t know she had. Christine has her husband, Ben, to rely upon and Dr. Nash, a researcher whom she meets secretly. He reminds her to write in her journal, so that each morning she can read what happened the day before. At the front of her journal is written ‘Don’t trust Ben’. So begins Before I go to sleep, a much-hyped book which raises the questions of who you are apart from your memories, and who you can trust when you have no strong sense of yourself. These questions are the reason I bought the book; they seem so pertinent to our culture, in which identity is a lifestyle choice and memories are disposable.
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