The Memory of Us

"The Memory of Us is, like most of my books, is an emotional drama that covers friendship and love. I’ve had close friends feature in books, and I’ve had family being important in books, but I’ve never explored the relationship between two sisters. That was where I started with The Memory of Us. I wanted to have them as sisters. I didn’t want them to be conventional twins, but I have a friend who has two children by IVF, a boy and a girl. They were born years apart, and yet they refer to themselves as twins. I always thought that was bizarre. When I did a little bit of research into it, I found that a lot of IVF siblings who are born from the same round do feel that they are twins because they were conceived at the same time, albeit born years apart. I took that idea and ran with it. I wondered whether so-called conventional twin telepathy (or ESP or whatever you’d like to call it) might exist to some degree. I didn’t want to make it spooky, as in, ‘Oh, I know exactly what you’re doing!’ But for the purposes of my story, it was really useful to have them look very much alike and also to have this twin connection. In our own family, we have twins who have had that weird psychic link. One of them broke their leg, and the other one felt pain in their leg that day, even though they were miles apart and didn’t know anything that was happening. I would be the last person to pooh-pooh that and say it doesn’t exist. I kept that bubbling under the surface. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In my book, these twins have totally different lifestyles. The younger sister, Lexi, lives a very busy life in New York, where she’s an editor in a very big publishing house. The older sister, Amelia, lives in Somerset, in an old fisherman’s cottage by the beach, and works as an accountant. When a tragedy occurs and Amelia is found unconscious on the beach in the middle of the night, she is miraculously revived by a couple of doctors who happen to be passing on their way to a fishing trip. Lexi gets on a plane and comes back with the intention of nursing her sister back to health. When Amelia wakes up, all becomes really confusing because she has a whole load of false memories. She is calling for a husband that nobody has ever heard of—he doesn’t exist—and has a whole back story and history of memories with him that are completely false. It was interesting investigating this false memory phenomenon, which can occur after certain circumstances. It would normally fade. There’s nothing that will make the memories go away apart from the person realizing themselves that what they’re saying perhaps doesn’t make complete sense. You’re told not to challenge them. Don’t say, ‘Well, that’s rubbish!’ It would be the same with someone who has Alzheimer’s. You don’t become confrontational and cause an argument about somebody’s memory, or lack thereof. Amelia takes these memories to another level. In a bid to help her sister, Lexi goes down a route that is questionable. A lot of people say, ‘Well, that is surely going to end in disaster!’ But she decides to help in the only way she can because she feels so utterly helpless watching her sister struggle. In so doing, she meets a doppelgänger of how Amelia has described her husband, only to form an attachment with him that can go nowhere. We’re back to an impossible love story, which is obviously something that I love. You put your characters together in an interesting circumstance, and then you have to put an obstacle between them. I could think of nothing more insurmountable than falling in love with someone who your sister believes is her own husband. That seemed a good one to try and wriggle out of!"