Do You Remember?

Tess has few memories of the last seven or eight years because of an experimental drug with which her husband injects her every night. This drug was meant to cause short-term memory loss, to help ease the burden of her terminal cancer diagnosis, but has resulted in much more significant gaps. Though Tess’s memory is faulty and she often doubts her perceptions, other characters’ behavior almost always confirms her hunches, regardless of whether she’s aware of their choices.

Tess’s intuition tells her that Graham isn’t trustworthy, despite the letter he claims she wrote to herself saying otherwise. On “Day One,” she says, “I don’t feel anything for him [and] the idea of this man even touching me makes my skin crawl” (31). Despite his claim that they’ve been married for several years, the presence of pictures showing a happy couple throughout their home, and the letter in her handwriting, Tess senses that Graham isn’t a good guy. Her belief that her “heart has a memory of loving [Ziggy]” further confuses her because she feels she ought to “have [some] memory of loving Graham” (28). Nonetheless, he continues to feel “like a stranger” to her (44), indicating that she never really loved him.