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The Remembering
Some memories are treasured, re-read like a favourite book. Some are traumatic and won’t stay buried. But memories can be unreliable, can fade and mutate. They affect our actions and choices.
Memories of a happy marriage comfort Liz through widowhood, while flashbacks to a devastating sexual assault overwhelm her youngest daughter, Eve. Her middle daughter, Carlie, is building a new life in another country but longing for home is pulling her back, while Ginny, the eldest, takes on everyone’s problems as her own. Eve’s daughter, Rosie, remembers nothing of her absent father and yearns to track him down against her family’s wishes.
Then Liz is diagnosed with dementia, and the family’s resilience is tested as the matriarch begins to falter. If life is all memory, what is left when it’s gone?
Memory is at the core of all these women’s lives: elusive, intrusive, helpful or misleading. What’s revealed is a story about the struggle to maintain a sense of family, home, and self, amidst all life can throw at you.
Memories of a happy marriage comfort Liz through widowhood, while flashbacks to a devastating sexual assault overwhelm her youngest daughter, Eve. Her middle daughter, Carlie, is building a new life in another country but longing for home is pulling her back, while Ginny, the eldest, takes on everyone’s problems as her own. Eve’s daughter, Rosie, remembers nothing of her absent father and yearns to track him down against her family’s wishes.
Then Liz is diagnosed with dementia, and the family’s resilience is tested as the matriarch begins to falter. If life is all memory, what is left when it’s gone?
Memory is at the core of all these women’s lives: elusive, intrusive, helpful or misleading. What’s revealed is a story about the struggle to maintain a sense of family, home, and self, amidst all life can throw at you.
288 pages, Paperback
Published September 27, 2022
62 people want to read
About the author
Susan Sinnott
2 books11 followersSusan Sinnott was born in the UK and now lives in St. John's, Newfoundland. She was awarded the Percy Janes First Novel Award for her then-unpublished manuscript, "Just Like Always" (later Catching the Light), and an excerpt was adapted for inclusion in Racket, an anthology of short fiction by the Port Authority writing group, edited by Lisa Moore. Susan has also contributed to the Newfoundland Quarterly Online.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 2, 2022
As with her debut (YA crossover) novel, Catching the Light, this is another beautifully crafted novel that gets to the heart of the matter. The author explores similar themes - family, community, trauma, and the burden of being a survivor - this time focusing on the women in three (3) generations of one family. Again, as in Catching the Light, this is a love letter to Newfoundland, St. John’s in particular this time out.
Using Liz’s dementia as an organising framework, this novel is reminiscent of Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing. Memory is elusive... What we remember and how we remember morphs over time… and the importance we place on those memories changes also. As Liz loses her voice - and her sense of self - Rosie and Eve find theirs, and themselves.
This time, the characters have to overcome the misconceptions and perceptions that they have of themselves… how their own internalisations influence the way they look at the world, and how they treat others. As I commented in my review of Catching the Light: They are sometimes hard to move past. But when we do… oh the worlds that open up to us.
While there is no question that the events here are tragic on one level, this is really, at heart, a story of joy. This novel is a testament to the strength - and courage - of women, of kinship bonds, of knowing what you want out of life (and also of not knowing). It is a reminder that we all have the capacity for change - in ourselves and in the world - and that we don’t have to do it all on our own… we are stronger when we are together. This is like a recipe for building strong women, and by default, strong communities.
All in all, this is another beautifully crafted, unabashedly Canadian novel… down to its very core… Savour it also as you read.
Using Liz’s dementia as an organising framework, this novel is reminiscent of Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing. Memory is elusive... What we remember and how we remember morphs over time… and the importance we place on those memories changes also. As Liz loses her voice - and her sense of self - Rosie and Eve find theirs, and themselves.
This time, the characters have to overcome the misconceptions and perceptions that they have of themselves… how their own internalisations influence the way they look at the world, and how they treat others. As I commented in my review of Catching the Light: They are sometimes hard to move past. But when we do… oh the worlds that open up to us.
While there is no question that the events here are tragic on one level, this is really, at heart, a story of joy. This novel is a testament to the strength - and courage - of women, of kinship bonds, of knowing what you want out of life (and also of not knowing). It is a reminder that we all have the capacity for change - in ourselves and in the world - and that we don’t have to do it all on our own… we are stronger when we are together. This is like a recipe for building strong women, and by default, strong communities.
All in all, this is another beautifully crafted, unabashedly Canadian novel… down to its very core… Savour it also as you read.
June 15, 2023
This book was so beautiful and heartrending. Set in Newfoundland, The Remembering follows three generations of women (matriarch Liz, her daughters Ginny, Carlie and Eve, and Eve's daughter Rosie) over two decades as they navigate the trials and tribulations of life.
At the start of the novel, you meet this family at such a vulnerable time—there's a content warning for this—Eve has just returned home from Mexico where she suffered a harrowing sexual assault and her mother Liz is the first and only person besides her husband to learn of this and the following pregnancy that may or may not be a result.
It is such a difficult and devastating situation that Sinnott handles with such care, and so much of the book itself is centred around this one experience, their reactions to it, and how it shapes the rest of their lives.
How one violent act can echo for years.
The delicate way this book handles trauma is like the deft cracking of an egg, exposing all of the love, shame, family secrets and messiness of relationships that are always right there under the surface.
It's also about the ways in which memory can bolster or bury you, and what happens to a family when its beloved matriarch faces the endless mind-eroding disease of dementia. Sinnott does an amazing job of expressing the idea of memory and the way we are always recalibrating and reframing our own choices and experiences as we look back throughout our lives.
I really loved the way this book moved me, I was so invested in the Wallace family and I think this is a story that really longs and deserves to be read.
At the start of the novel, you meet this family at such a vulnerable time—there's a content warning for this—Eve has just returned home from Mexico where she suffered a harrowing sexual assault and her mother Liz is the first and only person besides her husband to learn of this and the following pregnancy that may or may not be a result.
It is such a difficult and devastating situation that Sinnott handles with such care, and so much of the book itself is centred around this one experience, their reactions to it, and how it shapes the rest of their lives.
How one violent act can echo for years.
The delicate way this book handles trauma is like the deft cracking of an egg, exposing all of the love, shame, family secrets and messiness of relationships that are always right there under the surface.
It's also about the ways in which memory can bolster or bury you, and what happens to a family when its beloved matriarch faces the endless mind-eroding disease of dementia. Sinnott does an amazing job of expressing the idea of memory and the way we are always recalibrating and reframing our own choices and experiences as we look back throughout our lives.
I really loved the way this book moved me, I was so invested in the Wallace family and I think this is a story that really longs and deserves to be read.
January 28, 2024
A beautiful book written by Newfoundland author, Susan Sinnott. I loved Catching the Light and this one was excellent as well. Here’s to strong women!!!
February 10, 2025
can’t believe this has less than 40 reviews…. this took me from 1993 to 2012, the author was telling a story and the story was telling lol will re-read eventually once I purchase a physical copy.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews