I Forgot to Remember

A Memoir of Amnesia

Su Meck, Daniel de Visé

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451685831
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The courageous memoir of a woman who was robbed of all her memories by a traumatic brain injury—and her more than twenty-five-year struggle to reclaim her life: “[A tale] of triumph in the search for identity” (The New York Times Book Review).

In 1988, Su Meck was twenty-two and married with two children when a ceiling fan fell and struck her on the head, erasing all her memories of her life. Although her body healed rapidly, her memories never returned. After just three weeks in the hospital, her physicians released Su and she returned home to take care of her two toddlers. What would you do if you lost your past?

Adrift in a world about which she understood almost nothing, Su became an adept mimic, gradually creating routines and rituals that sheltered her and her family from the near-daily threat of disaster—or so she thought. Though Su would eventually relearn to tie her shoes, cook a meal, read, and write, nearly twenty years would pass before a series of personally devastating events shattered the “normal” life she had worked so hard to build, and she realized that she would have to grow up all over again.

In her own indelible voice, Su offers a unique view from the inside of a terrible injury as she “recounts her grueling climb back to normalcy…in this heart-wrenching true story” (O, The Oprah Magazine). Piercing, heartbreaking, but finally uplifting, I Forgot to Remember is the story of a woman determined to live life on her own terms.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• These Are the Days of Our Lives
• Chapter 1: Life in the Fast Lane
• Chapter 2: Confusion
• Chapter 3: I Don’t Remember
• Chapter 4: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
• Chapter 5: You’ve Got A Friend
• Chapter 6: Eminence Front
• Chapter 7: Better Things
• Chapter 8: Mama, I’m Comin’ Home
• Chapter 9: The Great Pretender
• Chapter 10: Life Is a Lemon, and I Want My Money Back
• Chapter 11: Ode to My Family
• Chapter 12: Sweet Child O’ Mine
• Chapter 13: School
• Chapter 14: Walk Like an Egyptian
• Chapter 15: Shiny Happy People
• Chapter 16: Some Days Are Better Than Others
• Chapter 17: Perfect
• Chapter 18: Hello, Goodbye
• Chapter 19: Thin Line Between Love and Hate
• Chapter 20: What If
• Chapter 21: Bridge Over Troubled Water
• Chapter 22: Learning to Fly
• Chapter 23: Wish You Were Here
• Chapter 24: Break on Through
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About Su Meck and Daniel de Visé
• Copyright