Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

The world is raving about Elizabeth is Missing and for good reason too. It's the debut work of Emma Healey, ginger, 29 and 'a pale-faced, slightly distressed looking author' ~ The Times. It is good, well the 9% of it that I read anyway. It just didnt take me in and hold me.

Maude has dementia, Alzheimer’s or some other such illness and Healy does great to portray the struggles that this condition holds on its quarry. Maude cannot remember what she did yesterday and in some cases what she just did or said minutes ago. It’s frustrating for her, her carers and her daughter (who visits her daily, mostly to find cans of peaches everywhere).

Maude cannot contact her friend Elizabeth and suspects foul play is at hand. She asks everyone she can, constantly. There is a lot of this repetitiveness in the story because it is the condition that plagues Maude. We are also made aware of something that happened to Maude’s sister some 70 years ago. This is where it gets a bit too unreal for me. Maude can remember this part of her life in detail but nothing else. She cannot remember if she bought tins of peaches but knows exactly where her friend Elizabeth lives and how to get there. The inconsistences I believe was the reason I didn’t persist with the book. If she has memory loss then she has memory loss and the narrator cannot have total recall of events, places and situations to justify the story. The story cannot be written because the story cannot be remembered. Maude is the narrator not someone outside looking in.