68 pages • 2 hours read
Liane MoriartyWhat Alice Forgot
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Memories
Memories are an important and recurring motif, which contextualize characters’ feelings and relationships. Without her memory, Alice has no context with which to understand her life, or to understand her flashes of memory: She is shocked by Elisabeth’s sad and hardened appearance. Alice’s memory of the American doctor performing the ultrasound, “I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat,” which comes to her unbidden and must be explained by Elisabeth, finally allows her to contextualize Elisabeth’s grief (69).
Alice remembers pink balloons against a clouded sky, an image from Gina’s funeral, and is struck with a feeling of grief and devastation. The smell of her shampoo reminds Alice of sobbing uncontrollably in the shower. These memories illustrate Alice’s grief over losing her friend, Gina.
Frannie’s memories of Nick and Alice over time allow the reader to understand their changing dynamic. Her first memory of the couple involves Nick and Alice sitting on a couch at Frannie’s; their affection is clear to her in the way that Nick “was caressing Alice’s little finger with his own” (114). On a later visit, Frannie remembers Nick and Alice “talking to each other in those terrible, icily polite voices I’ve noticed couples use in public when they’re arguing” (114).
At the conclusion of the story, 10 years on from the primary events of the story, Alice reflects on her marriage of shared memories. She concludes that “each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread which bound them [Nick and Alice] together” (457).
George and Mildred
The varied states of the sandstone lions, George and Mildred, are symbolic of Alice and Nick’s relationship. When Alice is suffering from her memory loss, she notices that the two lions, who they had personified affectionately and used to joke about 10 years earlier, are absent from the front of the home. Their state of discard symbolizes the deterioration of Nick and Alice’s marriage: “George was lying on his side, as if he’d been kicked over. His once dignified lion’s face was now stained a moldy green, which made him look ashamed, as if he were an old man with food all over his face … Mildred was sitting in the middle of a pile of old pots. There was a huge chip out of one paw, and she looked sad and resigned” (384). Alice scrubs at them determinedly; her resolution to save her marriage is mirrored in her determination to return the lions to their former glory.
Alice wonders if the lions will ever be the same again or if they are “too scarred by the years of neglect?” (385). She wonders whether “each argument, each betrayal and nasty word built up into an ugly rock-hard layer covering what was once so tender and true;” Alice determinedly thinks that, like the lions, “they would just have to chip away at it until it was gone” (385). Finally, Alice returns the lions to the front of the home. This, like the repair of their marriage, took intense effort and struggle—the lions had to be scrubbed clean for house and moved laboriously in a wheelbarrow. Furthermore, the lions, like the marriage of Alice and Nick, have been affected and changed by the passage of time. They have been returned to their former position but will never be exactly the same. Alice corrects her original misunderstanding that the marriage should be fixed to its previous state and instead comes to recognize that their relationship is forever evolving.
Elisabeth and Ben’s Ceremony
Elisabeth and Ben have experienced eight years of infertility. In some cases, this took the form of IVF cycles that failed to create a pregnancy. Six other times, Elisabeth became pregnant and then miscarried. The sadness of these experiences begins to entirely define Elisabeth’s life. This is clear when Alice wakes up without 10 years of her memory and is shocked to see that Elisabeth is desperately unhappy. Alice’s observation that the stress was causing Elisabeth to lose her mind is supported in Elisabeth’s near-abduction of the child outside Dino’s, which prompted Elisabeth to begin attending sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr. Jeremy Hodges.
The ceremony Ben and Elisabeth hold for the lost babies signifies the willingness and readiness of the couple to face the grief of the lost pregnancies. Elisabeth feels “something loosen” in her chest as she watches the flowers float away, each one symbolizing an unborn baby (442). This illustrates the cathartic nature of this ceremony for Elisabeth, who often felt that her miscarriages and miscarried babies were not given the grief or attention they deserved. Once the couple finally has their child, a healthy baby girl named Francesca, they are able to grieve the losses of their previous unborn children and move forward with their family.
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By Liane Moriarty
