Watson, S.J.: Before I Go to Sleep

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Christine Lucas wakes up in the morning, every morning, in a strange bed, next to a man she doesn't know. She makes her way to the bathroom and is shocked by what she sees in the mirror, a woman some twenty years older than she was expecting. Her husband, Ben, is eternally patient. Every morning he explains, when she confronts him in panic, that she is an amnesiac, that she's incapable of forming new memories, that every night when she goes to sleep the experiences she's had during the day are erased. That's been the pattern, at least, until she starts keeping a journal surreptitiously, at the suggestion of a doctor whom she's also seeing behind her husband's back. The journal allows her to piece together more information than Ben shares with her in any one typical day. It provides a connected narrative of her life, if no memory of it, and thus makes her condition a bit more manageable. And it lets her catch her husband when he lies to her. Christine is utterly helpless because she only knows what's she's been told. And now she's coming to realize that some of what she's been told isn't true. It's enough to make one paranoid.

Before I Go to Sleep is told from Christine's perspective, much of it in the form of the lengthy journal entries that she writes feverishly, trying to capture what's happened before it's lost to her. For the most part the story is filled with small events, doctor's visits and dinners, rather than pulse-pounding action scenes, but it is suffused with an undercurrent of delicious tension. It's a book that's hard to put down.