Sean Wilson’s second novel, YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS (Affirm Press 2025) is a slim, hardback, literary meditation on aging, memory and family.
Very different to his first novel (a remarkable historical crime thriller), it is nevertheless written in the same beautiful, lyrical prose, with evocative description that immerses the senses, and a warm and tender exploration of the main character, Grace, an older lady who ‘can’t settle’ and feels that there is ‘someone missing’.
If you love the writing of Amanda Lohrey, Helen Garner, Catherine de Saint Phalle and Elizabeth Strout, this is the novel for you. It reminded me very much of the 2020 movie, The Father, which starred Anthony Hopkins as a man with dementia, and Olivia Colman as his devoted daughter. For Grace in this book (as for the father in the movie), dementia and memory loss have faded the colour and texture from daily life, as she struggles to orientate herself in her house, her family, her life. Her recollections from her history – from her childhood, from her life as a young woman, from her experiences as a mother, from her unwanted admittance to a nursing home – are all confused and mixed up together in one big melting pot of smells, sounds, colours, emotions, feelings, desires and sadnesses. She has trouble telling what is real and what is imagined or remembered; what is now and what is from her past. The result is devastating not only for her, but for those who care for her.
As with the movie The Father (which I can also highly recommend), the audience or reader is immersed in the experience and sees everything from Grace’s perspective. The sense of muddling and befuddlement, the memories just out of reach, the moment of clarity followed by confusion, the fear that she can’t remember particular people or events, the annoyance that others are treating her differently, the certainty that she is in a particular place or time, shifted quickly to uncertainty even about who she is and what time of her life she inhabits. All of this is conveyed with such warmth, tenderness, compassion, curiosity, empathy and heart.
Wilson has cleverly shuffled the chapters in the book to help recreate this feeling of being untethered and confused. At first, I didn’t even notice that the book begins with Chapter 10. It wasn’t until I reached Chapter One (quite a few chapters in) that I realised that Wilson had represented Grace’s shifting memory with this clever and unusual format. It reads perfectly well as it is – with Grace in the present day, then remembering her childhood, then herself as a young bride, then back to now – but after reading the final pages, I wanted to begin again at Chapter One and sort through the book to read all the chapters in their chronological order. It is a simple but very effective device to replicate the mind of someone with dementia – scenes coming in and out of focus, shadows chasing rainbows, menacing feelings stronger than the actual memory of traumatic events, love and comfort dancing lightly across her mind as she catches glimpses of the good parts of her previous life.
Grace’s middle-aged lawyer daughter, Liv, and her young adult granddaughter, Claire, are as dear to her as she is to them, but there is frustration, disappointment and sorrow from all sides as Grace has lost the sense of herself and struggles sometimes to place them. ‘You must remember this’ is an oft-quoted refrain, but Grace’s mind is pernickety. She can clearly recall some events but others not at all, and those she does remember are mixed up together in a sometimes vivid, sometimes faded emotional soup.
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS explores themes of dementia, aging, memory loss, family dynamics, relationships, trauma, alcohol abuse and child neglect, and is a thoughtful meditation on society’s treatment of the aged, the ways in which we convince ourselves that we are fine, and the thin and fragile meniscus between cogent adulthood and the almost inevitable slippage into frailty and infirmity. It is a sad yet stunningly exquisite account of a life lived, loves lost, family mourned and the memories that stay with us but perhaps take on a different meaning.