The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science--A Memoir | 
| Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 8644
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.12092
ASIN: B0018E5GNS
Publication Date: May 6, 2008
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Product Description
Jill Price has the first diagnosed case of a memory condition called "hyperthymestic syndrome" -- the continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day of her life since she was fourteen. Give her any date from that year on, and she can almost instantly tell you what day of the week it was, what she did on that day, and any major world event or cultural happening that took place, as long as she heard about it that day. Her memories are like scenes from home movies, constantly playing in her head, backward and forward, through the years; not only does she make no effort to call her memories to mind, she cannot stop them.The Woman Who Can't Forget is the beautifully written and moving story of Jill's quest to come to terms with her extraordinary memory, living with a condition that no one understood, including her, until the scientific team who studied her finally charted the extraordinary terrain of her abilities. Her fascinating journey speaks volumes about the delicate dance of remembering and forgetting in all of our lives and the many mysteries about how our memories shape us.As we learn of Jill's struggles first to realize how unusual her memory is and then to contend, as she grows up, with the unique challenges of not being able to forget -- remembering both the good times and the bad, the joyous and the devastating, in such vivid and insistent detail -- the way her memory works is contrasted to a wealth of discoveries about the workings of normal human memory and normal human forgetting. Intriguing light is shed on the vital role of what's called "motivated forgetting"; as well as theories about childhood amnesia, the loss of memory for the first two to three years of our lives; the emotional content of memories; and the way in which autobiographical memories are normally crafted into an ever-evolving and empowering life story.Would we want to remember so much more of our lives if we could? Which memories do our minds privilege over others? Do we truly relive the times we remember most vividly, feeling the emotions that coursed through us then? Why do we forget so much, and in what ways do the workings of memory tailor the reality of what's actually happened to us in our lives?In The Woman Who Can't Forget, Jill Price welcomes us into her remarkable life and takes us on a mind-opening voyage into what life would be like if we didn't forget -- a voyage after which no reader will think of the magical role of memory in our lives in the same way again.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 "If we remember everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing." William James (p 181) July 16, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Jill Price is remarkably skilled at perfectly retrieving memories of her past and significant historic events by day and date, but is unable to do justice to that fact through her memoir. Born in NYC in 1965 and raised in an upper-middle class Jewish family, she didn't realize until the age of twelve that her memory was remarkable. At thirty-four, she sought help from renowned memory researcher Dr. James McGaugh. Six years later, he and his colleagues published the results of their extensive testing on "AJ," entitled, A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering (fifteen specific, scientific-minded pages readily available online).
I'd love to spend an hour listening to her talk about her memories (she did well in an NPR interview), but can't say the same about her life story in written form. Ms. Price comes across as a needy, privileged packrat who tends to dwell on the negative, especially her mother's incessant naggings about her weight (an ongoing theme), her father's abandonment of the family, and her mother's health problems. A few things make the book almost palatable: brief descriptions of certain types of memory, references to stories with memory-related themes, and chapter-preceding quotes (probably provided by the co-author). But it's hard to get past distractions like the overuse of certain words and phrases, sometimes on the same page (e.g., "thought-provoking," "hugely relieved," "wrenching," and "stoicism"); the three page time line (a waste of paper); the overinclusion of the minutiae of her everday life (no more interesting than the average person's); the awful, amateurish writing; and the obvious lack of editing. And just when you think it can't get worse, you reach chapter 9 (warning-spoilers), in which you learn that this right-side-of-the-tracks-born, pampered, hoarder, rich girl meets the love of her life, a tattooed, pierced, flannel-wearing Type I Diabetes-afflicted (although in denial about), divorced father of two...in a chat room. The only "thought-provoking" thing about the book that you can't read on the dust jacket is what she considers too "personal" to share with readers, considering her willingness to gush about bedding her beau on their second day together. The Woman Who Can't Forget is a forgettable memoir about an average woman with an incredible memory. Better books on brains: A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas, Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet, and A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar. And by Yasunari Kawabata: The Old Capital.
Written by a child? July 14, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I know this book was ghostwritten but it went too far in making it seem it was written by an average person. It read at about 7th grade level. I realize doctors and scientists do not know much about this unusual condition yet was disappointed there was not more discussion of the medical and psychological history, physiology and studies about memory. The memoir about Jill's life is just not that interesting.
An interesting story July 13, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's no surprise that Jill Price has become the go-to girl in her family for reminders about birthdays and anniversaries: she's incapable of forgetting them. Given a date from 1980 on--her memory before she was fourteen is spottier--she can rattle off a laundry list of her activities on that day and provide headline news as well, provided she was aware of the event at the time. Her memory works in reverse, too: given an event, she can tell you its date and significance in her own life. Her extraordinary memory is limited to the autobiographical, however. She is not one of those savants who can memorize long lists of prime numbers or the value of pi to hundreds of places. And in fact her aptitude for rote memorization of that sort is relatively poor, which proved problematic for her in school.
In her autobiography, Price discusses, but only superficially, memory-related scientific research in general and the tests that have been conducted on her own memory. (She was the subject of a paper published in the scientific journal Neurocase.) But mostly she tells us the story of her life with an emphasis on how her bizarre memory has kept her from living normally. The advantages of having a nearly perfect autobiographical memory are obvious: she can remember with perfect clarity, for example, the giddy joy she felt when she first met her husband. But the negatives are more numerous. Price can also remember, with perfect clarity, the conversation she had with doctors about allowing them to harvest her husband's organs once he was taken off life support. Nor can she will herself not to remember such things: Price's memories come to her unbidden, replaying in her head in apparently random order. Moreover, when Price remembers she relives the emotion of the original experience. So deaths and slights and embarrassments and childhood terror are as painful and frightening and sad as they were originally. Interestingly, the intensity of Price's relived emotion is sometimes evident on the page. In recalling painful episodes from her adolescence, Price's voice is imbued with the resentments of a teenager toward her parents.
Price collaborated on her book with a writer, Bart Davis. The resulting narrative is a quick read with a conversational tone. Unfortunately, the writing is bland and occasionally repetitive. This is a shame, because Price certainly has an interesting story to tell. Were it written in snappier prose, her book might have been--forgive me--unforgettable.
-- Debra Hamel
 You Can Do It, Too June 22, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Seeing this fascinating woman's story lead me to the discovery of my life: how anyone can improve brain function without medicine or surgery that starts working immediately and only improves as you practice. When Jill Price, "The Woman Who Can't Forget" was cat scanned, we learned one area of her brain was used more than other persons used it. When she was 8, she TRAINED her brain to organize memories by date, just by telling her brain to do so.
All of us have more than one "channel" of brain thoughts going simultaneously. My real time thoughts are interrupted constantly over the two survival techniques humans require: where are we getting our next food (for survival of the self) and where are we getting our next sex (for survival of the species). In addition I had interruptions from negative thoughts of remembered experiences and regrets. When these memories are of painful events, they can interfere with or disable normal function.
The solution? TELL YOUR BRAIN TO OPEN ANOTHER CHANNEL. That's it. I had already used this technique to solve lifelong inexplicable questions. I would tell myself before I went to sleep to send me the answers in a dream or daydream. And it worked! I once got the answer to a problem that arose before I was old enough to verbalize what was happening -- right in the middle of a busy expressway!
After reading Jills story, I told myself to open a "happy" channel. Whenever a negative thought arose, I immediately replace it with a happy thought (too personal to give examples). You can have two (maybe even more) channels open at all times if you practice for "being here now", the past, overcoming the past, and the future - simultaneously as you direct. Try it, youll like it -- and thank you Jill!
The woman who can't forget June 14, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A good book written by a normal person who has an extraordinary gift/curse. There is a lot of information and insight into the different kinds of memory, both theory and fact- not to mention this woman's unique version and experiences.
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