I recently and accidentally read “The Woman Who Can’t Forget,” a memoir by Jill Price (with Bart Davis).
What caught my eye—and piqued my interest—was the supertitle, “The extraordinary story of living with the most remarkable memory known to science.” I had a weird experience late last year where my memory was affected by Topamax, a migraine preventive I was trying.
Apparently Topamax’s biggest potential side effects are hand-and-toe tingling or weight loss.
Just my luck. I didn’t lose weight, I lost short-term memory. At first, I thought it must be my imagination. I’ve always been good at memorizing phone numbers, for example. But over the course of a couple of months ... I was losing them. I also started forgetting names. Not my friends or family or co-workers, but the names of actors or authors or musicians and so forth. Not a good thing when you’re an entertainment writer.
Trying to figure out if I was going senile or nuts, I went back and read Topamax’s side effects. Sure enough, it affects memory in a tiny percentage of cases. Plus—although I know people who had great results with it—it ”
wasn’t making a big difference with my headaches.
I asked my doctor, who immediately took me off it—and again, sure enough, within a month or two, I started retaining phone numbers again. I’d have to look up a number I had forgotten. But once I did, it was back.
Kinda scary.
Anyhow, that’s why this book attracted me. And a couple of days after I finished reading it—last Friday—ABC’s “20/20” did a story on Jill Price. So it was really interesting to see Price talk about her story, even if Diane Sawyer spent way too much time trying to trip her up with memory quizzes.
The thing about Price is that her memory—and it IS extraordinary—is for her own life and things that happened in or during her life (as opposed to facts or figures).
You can ask what day pretty much any big event of the last 30 years happened, and she can tell you not only the date but the day of the week ... as well as what she was doing or thinking or even wearing that day. As she points out, though, it’s as much a curse as a blessing—she has a sort of continuing video running in her head of nearly everything that has happened to her since she hit puberty. The good and the bad along with the ugly.
The book itself tends toward repetition—I would rather have had a shorter book that doesn’t tell the same stories or make the same explanation more than once—but still, it raises fascinating questions. If all goes well, Price and her researchers will make valuable discoveries as to how our memories actually work.
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