Lara Avery’s The Memory Book Will Destroy You (And It’ll Be Awesome)

Then she’s dealt a hand of genetic bad luck: late onset Niemann-Pick, a condition that will rob her of her memories, her mind, and eventually her life.
Despite the dark prognosis, she’s determined to muscle through it with the help of an inspirational task force including Elizabeth Warren, Serena Williams, and Malala Yousafzai, bucking the odds to head to college in the fall. So she starts writing her memory book, a series of missives to her future self meant to work as a second brain when her own fails her. In it she records dialogue between her loving, ever-exhausted parents. She logs her dates with Stuart Shah, her longtime crush, who’s back in town to tend bar and work on his novel. Without acknowledging the end date on her own life, she imagines futures for the three younger siblings whose adult selves she’ll never know.
But the book can’t save her from the bouts of memory loss and disorientation that start at a debate tournament and strike at random. Yet as Sammie’s mind and body betray her, her world doesn’t shrink under her illness—it expands. As she loses New York, college, the whole bright continent of her imagined future, she regains the present. She sees her family more clearly. She remembers why she loves every stick and rock of her mountain.
And she reclaims Coop, the childhood best friend who ditched her for popularity in junior high. Their history is almost as long as her memory, full of kid logic and long summer days spent on adventures. Watching the two of them fall back into the rhythm of their salad days, under the cloud of what’s to come, will leave you crying behind your sunglasses in public, unless that experience is specific to me.
Sammie is the perfect heroine to carry her story, possessed of a questing intelligence and clarity of mind. Her ambitious pragmatism combines with magical thinking, meaning she accepts the parameters of her condition but rarely its ultimate meaning—her moments of hopelessness never last for long. And the book’s format is brilliant. It starts out as a diary and expands to include remembered conversations, memories, bright flashes of narrative as Sammie attempts to capture the beautiful, brave, heartbreaking things about life that her brain can no longer hold onto: A drive with the boy she loves. Her parents recounting the day they met, and how they fell for each other. A history of her family as told through their weekly movie nights.
By the end, when other voices from Sammie’s life chime in, you’ll realize Avery has managed to both fit the best of life inside her book, all the love and pain and mess of it, and to express with painful clarity the impossibility of the task. Sammie’s voice and potential spill over the sides of The Memory Book. She’s brainy and bitchy and bold and deeply real, and that her story can’t go on and on will break your heart.
The Memory Book is on sale now.