Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found

by Jill Robinson

Overview

A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is.

She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own—how well did she ever know them? Can You make up for a past you don't really remember?

It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again.

Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory.

In Past Forgetting, Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she had: Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite remember: when her father was running MGM.

In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotion? Is memory an act of reinvention? Do people reinvent rather than recollect? In Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060932343
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/14/2000
Series:	Harper Perennial
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	754,858
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Jill Robinson has written nine books, including the bestsellers Perdido and her seminal memoir, Bed/Time/Story. She grew up in Hollywood, where her father ran MGM, and writes about issues of love and loss for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. Robinson runs the Wimpole Street Writers Group in London, where she lives with her husband, Stuart Shaw.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

It begins like this. I am awake. Sunlight comes through the window. A warm body sits next to me on the bed. A firm torso or arm, pressing close, male or female. Not sure. The sun frames the blond hair. Solid presence-stability.

Crisp, heavy sheets. This is a hospital somewhere. And I'm in it.

Looking hard against the sun, I can see the face. "So, you're captivating," I say, "and who are you?"

"I'm your husband," he says. "I'm Stuart."

"That's a beginning," I laugh, "and who am I?" I'd like to ask, "And where are we," but that's too much to know just now.

"You're Jill. You're a writer."

He's scared, I can hear that. But at the same time he's able to be reassuring. "You're going to be just fine."

I can tell he's lying. "I didn't ask."

He takes my hand. "But you will. Do you remember climbing out of the pool?"

"Yes," I say. Can he tell when I'm lying?

I remember swimming. I am stretching every muscle to match the drive of the woman leading aerobics before this--collar blade outlined in sweat, thigh bones shadowed like the ridge under Ava Gardner's brows. Am I in Palm Springs? Twenty laps. I've got nineteen. "You're there," I urge myself on, "just one more."

Now I'm here in this hospital. "So, did I hit my head?" I don't wait for an answer. "How long have I been out?"

"A while," he says.

I lean against his arm.

It is night. Someone brawny is sitting beside me. "Hello . . ."--male voice--"now have some soup." He tries to feed me. I can't taste the name of it. "You could have drowned," he's telling me, "but you got out of the pool somehow."

I touch his forearm lightly. "This is very patient, nice of you tosit here with me."

"I'm your husband."

"I know--but I don't know." Tears. "If you know what I mean."

Here's the next banner of time I catch hold of. A man in white comes in. He puts up the shade. Behind him the world is flat, plain, and soft green, like a land in an old-fashioned children's book. I've never been out of America. Our family doesn't fly. Not since Carole Lombard was killed in the plane crash.

"It's sweet outside," I say.

"Are you asking where you are?"

"Probably."

He's great looking. Blond, built like Spencer Tracy, he'll charm my father. "Are you my doctor?" I look him up and down.

He sits down next to me on the bed and puts his hand over mine. "I'm your husband, Jill. You're at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital near Tring."

Mandeville. That's familiar, I think.

"In England," he says.

"You know, I thought England looked like this." I don't want to ask how I got here. Not yet. My head's splitting. "The kids--is there a phone I can use? I have to call my kids." I look him over. I can't make any connection here between him and my kids, Jeremy and Johanna. "Who's with them?"

"Jill." He's trying to get me to pay attention, to see how long I can hold onto what he tells me. "You've been in a coma and you've forgotten things. It's only temporary." He hopes. "Jeremy and Johanna are grown."

"I've been out so long?" I try to sit up.

"It will all come back." He's trying to reassure both of us. He sounds English. My life is over and I've come back in an old war movie.

"There's a piece missing," I explain. I touch his hand and I'm gone again.

I'm leaning against a man's chest. I'm seriously unhappy. "You'll remember soon."

Anger is the last thing I remembered before the seizure, which put me into the coma, shattered my ability to remember and erased years of recollection.

My husband and I had come to a spa outside London, where we live. We made a pact to get fit, he reminds me now.

"You didn't want to rush dressing to go in for breakfast. You were trying on outfits. So I went back to bed to read until you decided you were ready. Then you discovered I'd brought chocolate with me to the spa. You put on your bathing suit, said, 'Forget breakfast, I'm going swimming.'"

"So I was the one who was angry."

"Yes."

Is his voice appealing because it's familiar, or because the tone, the rhythm, appeals to my taste? Do I remember my taste? What if I've forgotten how I dress? It's okay. He won't mind. Maybe.

We're searching each other's faces. He's trying to see if I don't remember. I'm trying to show I do. "So we'd been away a while."

"Only a couple of days," he says.

"It just feels like forever," I say.

"You're playing it well." He strokes my hand.

I rub my eyes to blank out tears.

"After you went off to swim," he says, "I got up and went in for my circuit training. I was on my way when they called me."

"Have you told me what happened each time you've visited?"

"Yes," he says, "more or less."

"What about telling me more."

"A maid discovered you in a seizure at ten. You'd made it to our room," he's stroking my hand with his forefinger and leaning towards me with his head down, "at five minutes after ten, that is, you were still convulsing, half on the bed, half on the floor, when the housekeeper came in. They called me." He looks at his watch now. "I came in at ten-ten and you were still in the condition they call stasis."

What People are Saying About This

Anne Rice

An exquisitely written and perceptive book describing a traumatic interruption in a woman's life. There are lessons here for everyone. This is a brilliant probe of the value of memory and a sense of continuity of personal events...An absolute pleasure to read.

Judy Collins

Jill Robinson is a born writer whose lyric prose soars with vivid insight and those epiphanies only the truly gifted can give us. As Jill, the natural and inspired graceful writer, moved me through the darkness of memory loss into the light of remembering, bringing gifts of insight and astounding honesty, I was moved to tears and shouts of joy. Past Forgetting is an important book filled with beauty, light, and grace. What Jill has learned to remember, we can never forget.

Anne Edwards

Past Forgetting is a book that will not easily be forgotten for Jill Robinson takes the reader on a memorable and frightening journey into the world of the amnesiac. What Robinson never lost was her ability to write powerful prose.

Carolyn See

One of Hollywood's genuine princesses has produced an extraordinary work: a memoir about her amnesia. The extraordinary thing is--it works.

Evan Hunter

Having lost her memory, and fearful she would never write again, Jill Robinson set out to prove that she could--magnificently! Past Forgetting is painfully honest, compellingly readable, enormously entertaining, and ultimately triumphant! Bravo!

Patricia Bosworth

Here is the wondrous and brave Jill Robinson demonstrating the extraordinarily penetrating ways she has of rediscovering her amazing life. Her writing is subtle and beautiful--filled with grace and pain. Once you open Past Forgetting you won't be able to put it down.

Ann Beattie

Jill Robinson's new book is totally engrossing. I would expect no less from her, but--amazingly--the subject of the book is the loss of memory, and her honesty, her humor, and her brilliant gift for individual sentences stopped this reader's world, as well. Sure, I remember Jill: always on the edge, always taking a risk, both personally and professionally, always focused sharply on every charm on the bracelet, though the jangle--the general look and feel and sound of things--might have preoccupied us if she hadn't stopped to play with, and to offer up, each individual part. This is my favorite of her books so far--one I think readers will extrapolate meaning from, checking their own lives against the writer's expanding consciousness, involving us as participants in fashioning the odd cat's cradle of past and present, memory and mistake that links the important, and the seemingly inconsequential, moments of our lives.

Editorial Reviews

?"Past Forgetting" is a book that will not easily be forgotten for Jill Robinson takes the reader on a memorable and frightening journey into the world of the amnesiac. What Robinson never lost was her ability to write powerful prose.?-- Anne Edwards?One of Hollywood's genuine princesses has produced an extraordinary work: a memoir about her amnesia. The extraordinary thing is--it works.?-- Carolyn See?Jill Robinson's new book is totally engrossing. I would expect no less from her, but--amazingly--the subject of the book is the loss of memory, and her honesty, her humor, and her brilliant gift for individual sentences stopped this reader's world, as well. Sure, I remember Jill: always on the edge, always taking a risk, both personally and professionally, always focused sharply on every charm on the bracelet, though the jangle--the general look and feel and sound of things--might have preoccupied us if she hadn't stopped to play with, and to offer up, each individual part. This is my favorite of her books so far--one I think readers will extrapolate meaning from, checking their own lives against the writer's expanding consciousness, involving us as participants in fashioning the odd cat's cradle of past and present, memory and mistake that links the important, and the seemingly inconsequential, moments of our lives.? -- Ann Beattie?Jill Robinson is a born writer whose lyric prose soars with vivid insight and those epiphanies only the truly gifted can give us. As Jill, the natural and inspired graceful writer, moved me through the darkness of memory loss into the light of remembering, bringing gifts of insight and astounding honesty, I was moved to tears and shouts of joy. "PastForgetting" is an important book filled with beauty, light, and grace. What Jill has learned to remember, we can never forget.?-- Judy Collins"Here is the wondrous and brave Jill Robinson demonstrating the extraordinarily penetrating ways she has of rediscovering her amazing life. Her writing is subtle and beautiful--filled with grace and pain. Once you open "Past Forgetting" you won't be able to put it down."-- Patricia Bosworth"Having lost her memory, and fearful she would never write again, Jill Robinson set out to prove that she could--magnificently! "Past Forgetting" is painfully honest, compellingly readable, enormously entertaining, and ultimately triumphant! Bravo!"-- Evan Hunter"An exquisitely written and perceptive book describing a traumatic interruption in a woman's life. There are lessons here for everyone. This is a brilliant probe of the value of memory and a sense of continuity of personal events...An absolute pleasure to read."-- Anne Rice"Robinson achieves literary resonance, and so achieves a victory over forgetting." -- Daisy Fried, Newsday?A rare, almost heroically well-written, at times hair-raising account of what the experience is really like, from the inside? [An] unflinching exploration of memory itself.?Reeve Lindbergh, New York Times Book Review?A particularly moving account by a writer who was told she would probably never write again.?Booklist"Curiously, while Robinson must find herself, readers are apt to feel that they have known her all along. Even while she strives to find her context, her personality is never in doubt. And that may be the essence of character."Boston Herald"Robinson's great fear during the long period of recovery is that she will neverbe able to write again. She needn't have worried. 'Past Forgetting'--part memory, part reinvention--is a fine book."Nina King, The Washington Post

From the Publisher

Classical, film-noir amnesia -- bewildered victim awakening in a hospital room with no sense of self, no memory of a name or of the events leading up to the present, dependent for clues on nurses and policemen and others claiming (but surely only pretending) to be family members: This sort of amnesiac state is almost completely a fiction. It is the stuff of movies and novels, a reliably suspenseful narrative device and a metaphor richly evocative of human experience but in fact hardly a human experience at all. Amnesia in the clinical sense is usually something much less absolute (and often quite temporary) even at its worst.

Odd, then, that Past Forgetting, a gemlike, seductively readable and quietly moving memoir recounting that great rarity, a truly encompassing and persistent loss of memory -- in this case caused by a swimming-pool accident -- should be written by a woman whose life involves so many fairy-tale elements and is populated by so many movie stars that if it were fiction it would seem ludicrously trashy. The novelist Jill Robinson (Perdido, Bed/Time/Story and many others) is the daughter of Dore Schary, who, when he replaced Louis B. Mayer at MGM, became legendary as the only screenwriter ever to be handed control of a movie studio.

Robinson spent her childhood and early adulthood at court with Hollywood royalty. This is a woman who grapples for memories of her childhood and comes up with snippets of conversations with Cary Grant. She conveys an impression that celebrity is a way of life -- a given, like sky or water, to be puzzled over only in philosophical asides. When she reconstructs a crucial period of dissolution in the '60s and early '70s (she writes with great insight on the texture of the counterculture), her partners in crime are Dennis Hopper and Bob Rafelson, Los Angeles art stars David Hockney and Ed Kienholz, and so on.

None of this stargazing detracts from the center of her narrative: the amnesiac writer's poignant groping, with her husband's patient, infinitely caring assistance, for an understanding of who she is, of how her children have grown and her parents have died and of how she came to be living in England when she knows she's never been on an airplane. Her struggling brain has crushed together her two marriages and mingled her children's childhood and her own. She cringes daily in anticipation of chastening phone calls from parents long dead. Her strongest remaining impressions are of the '70s.

Most strikingly, she recalls the vast emotional importance in her life of the act of writing, without remembering anything of the methods or the discipline writing requires, nor of what she would write about if she could. It is of course through her writing that she eventually recovers not her memory but her self. In a language at once conversational, aphoristic and deeply nuanced, Robinson shows herself coming to understand that even before her amnesiac rupture she was really only constructed of postulates, of stories, of moments; that memory is an illusion and a dance -- one she can rejoin if not reconstruct.

Two-thirds of the way through the book, she is lured out of her introspective convalescence by an assignment from Vanity Fair to search out the victim of a famous Los Angeles rape. The sequence at first threatens to derail the book but grows in interest until it becomes an analogical double for her memory quest and an exploration of the meaning of Los Angeles in the long aftermath of the '60s. It reads like a collaboration between Dominick Dunne and Steve Erickson; if, in Ezra Pound's famous dictum, literature is "news that stays news," then Robinson's accomplishment here might be described as gossip that stays gossip.

The emotional peak of her story comes late in the book, when she arranges a reunion with a certain grade school acquaintance, a boy who, despite his kindness, was daunting, distant, impossibly attractive and stirring in some way she has never quite resolved. She isn't certain he'll remember her at all -- her amnesiac condition is so absolute and infiltrative that she constantly attributes it to those around her and to the world at large -- but he greets her on the phone with familiarity and warmth. They meet and speak of childhood and self with vast sensitivity, and when Robinson finds a part of herself restored, the reader thinks: It isn't only amnesiacs who need to commune brilliantly with the most beautiful person of the opposite sex from grade school -- I need this, too!
— Salon

Jonathan Lethem

A rare, almost heroically well-written, at times hair-raising account of what the experience is really like, from the inside...[An] unflinching exploration of memory itself.
— New York Times Book Review

Reeve Lindbergh

An unflinching account of amnesia and the terror of being a writer without memory, this memoir adds a dramatic chapter to Robinson's life story, which she has explored in a previous memoir and fiction (Bed/Time/Story; PerdidoM.u<). One day in 1992, she woke up in a London hospital, unable to recognize her husband and drawing a blank on the last 10 years or so, because of a seizure. Later, she realized that her childhood "asthma" and several blackouts were attacks of epilepsy. Condensing a long, painful recovery period, Robinson adopts a style that's at times impressionistic but that's unified by fine powers of observation and flashes of humor. What fascinates the reader is which memories she has retained and which she has lost. Her devoted husband is largely a benevolent stranger. Her children from a former marriage--now adults living in the U.S.--are photographs and voices to her. She seems to recall her privileged childhood most clearly, offering a loving portrait of her father, the Oscar-winning writer and film executive Dore Schary, who ran MGM Studios for several years. Raised among Hollywood royalty in the '40s and '50s, Robinson occasionally confuses her life with movie plots, though some glitter remains from her friendships with Barbara Streisand, schoolmate "Bobby" Redford and such journalists as John Lahr. The book's primary appeal lies in the author's bravery in confronting her loss, gamely seeing old friends she doesn't remember, forming a writers' group as a kind of surrogate family and reconnecting emotionally with her grandchildren. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A misty memoir of amnesia triggered by a swimming pool accident, and the slow, painful retrieval of memory. The swimming-pool episode was apparently caused by an epileptic seizure, and Robinson was to learn that she had suffered from undiagnosed epilepsy since she was a child. The daughter of writer/movie mogul Dore Schary, she grew up in southern California, where her schoolmates and playmates were the likes of Robert Redford. A career as a relatively successful novelist (Star Country, 1996, etc.) included two husbands and two children before she settled in London with her third spouse, the extaordinarily patient and understanding hero of this work. When Robinson wakes from a brief coma following the accident, she doesn't know him. Although she accepts his and others' word that this man is her husband, it's apparently years before she is able to collate the memories of their mutual history. The Hollywood years are most vivid to the starstruck Robinson, and within the first 20 pages, there is mention of Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, and Cary Grant, with Barbra Streisand (a good friend), Erica Jong, Betty Friedan, Helen Gurley Brown, and others. Most interesting are descriptions of Robinson's efforts to restore her memory, including reading her husband's detailed journals of their years together and rereading her own books. She also keeps careful notes of day-to-day encounters, because she often cannot recall from one room to the next where she is or why she is there. She continues to write and never loses her ability to cook or her taste for clothes. A new doctor and new medication to control the seizures assist in her recovery. An intriguing but confusing view from inside theauthor's head that would be considerably improved by observations from the likes of Barbra and Erica about their now-forgetful friend.

Kirkus Reviews