The Woman who Can't Forget by Jill Price

I had high hopes for this book. Jill Price is a woman with a really unusual memory - given any event, she can tell you the date of it, and given any date, she can tell you in complete detail what she did - for the past thirty years. I expected this book to be about the neuroscience experiments she was involved in at various labs, and perhaps about how she developed coping mechanisms over time. Well boo on me for wanting a scientific book. Because this is a whiny memoir.

Price spends some of the book detailing her sessions with scientists at UCal to better understand her disorder, but the majority of the book is about how difficult her life is because of her memory. Something about the tone of the book and her voice made it difficult for me to muster up any empathy towards her. I did feel like she probably had other developmental problems other than just her extreme memory, and that the people in her life should have protected her better from writing this book. I felt disgusted when she met a man online (who she later married) who called her "hun" in their first IM - so weird.

Most importantly, I didn't think that many of the issues she recounted were attributable to her disorder, and thus she was just another person wanting to self-importantly write about how hard her life is. Her social anxiety and issues with attachment were no different from other memoirists' depictions, certainly not enough to justify a book about her.