Remind Me Who I Am, Again

At the beginning of the nineties Linda Grant's mother, Rose, became forgetful, frequently repeating the same question again and again: not because she couldn't remember the answer but because she could not recall having asked one, even seconds ago. In 1993 she was diagnosed with Multi-Infaret Dementia. It wasn't Alzheimer's disease but it would one day reach the same place, that lonely planet where those without memory live.

In Remind Me Who I Am, Again Linda Grant looks at the profound questions of identity, memoir and autonomy that dementia raises. Along with Rose's memory, a whole world was in the process of being lost forever. Growing up as they did in a Jewish immigrant family reborn for the twentieth century, a conspiracy of liars and tall-storytellers, Rose's children were now almost cut off from the truth about their extraordinary, wayward family - their father's day in 1920's New York as Harry Houdini's house guest, his beautiful doomed daughter from an earlier marriage, even his real name.

Does she know you? kind friends ask. But have Rose's children ever really known her? Remind Me Who I Am, Again is the story of a disease, the workings of the mind and a quest to reconstruct the past. Most of all it is a daughter's attempt to answer the question 'Do any of us really know our parents?