What Alice Forgot

Nick Love is Alice’s husband and the novel’s antagonist. They separate briefly and consider divorce, until Alice’s head injury allows her to reexamine their relationship from a different perspective. Nick, of Alice’s 29-year-old memory, is characterized as a doting, loving, and fun husband. When she wakes up after her accident at age 39, she is shocked that Nick now seems pompous and angry. He has become the general manager of his company; he is successful and very well paid. As his work responsibilities increased, he took longer, more frequent business trips, and this led Alice to feel abandoned. Nick feels that Alice holds his success against him and uses the children to punish him by threatening to take custody away from him in the divorce. Nick struggles with his and Alice’s estrangement and is devastated that he has to see his children less often.

Alice’s openness and vulnerability after her accident allow them to talk candidly about their resentments of one another and their feelings about their separation. Nick confides that Alice made him feel like an idiot at home, and that he felt like she resented him after Gina became single. Nick is overjoyed to return home; he and Alice agree to work on their marriage and discover a stronger, more complex love than they had when they were younger.

The story is framed around the life of Nick and Alice’s eldest daughter, Madison. 29-year-old Alice is pregnant with Madison—the “sultana”—and Nick and Alice are filled with love for each other and their unborn first child. When Alice wakes up after her head injury, she finds that Madison is furious and causing problems at school. Alice and Nick’s divorce is found to be the root of Madison’s problems. Madison makes this clear in the lines: “[A]re you going to come home, please, Dad? I think you should come home now and be Mum’s husband again. I’m pretty sure then I would stop being angry” (378). She is also traumatized from witnessing Gina’s death and suffers from terrible nightmares reliving the accident. At the conclusion of the novel, Madison is a calm and happy 20-year-old, studying at university. Madison’s wellbeing at each of these moments mirrors the wellbeing of Alice and Nick’s relationship.

Elisabeth is Alice’s older sister. She is characterized as confident and articulate but devastated by her repeated failures to have a successful pregnancy through IVF. At parties in their 20s, Elisabeth used to “march her way from person to person … as if it were her duty to talk to every single person” (209). Elisabeth is married to Ben. She runs a successful business running seminars about direct advertising, which some consider “junk mail.” Elisabeth and Alice had a close and loving relationship but drifted in their 30s; Alice became a busy mother of three, and Elisabeth became embittered, furious, and grief-stricken with six miscarriages and many unsuccessful cycles of IVF.

Elisabeth feels that her infertility defines her. Her closest friends are a group of women she met at an infertility support group; they call each other the “infertiles.” She is desperately unhappy and frustrated until she and Ben give birth to their child, Francesca. After Francesca is born, Ben and Elisabeth hold a ceremony to grieve their six unborn babies. This provides some closure and solace. Later, Ben and Elisabeth adopt three boys from Vietnam. Elisabeth is a catalyst in the story because she helps spark Alice’s memory and gives her a chance to repair their relationship.