Remind Me Again What Happened by Joanna Luloff

Joanna Luloff is one of the English professors downtown at the University of Colorado Denver, one that I have had the privilege of taking two fiction writing workshops from during my college career. She is a wonderful human being with a great eye for successful fiction, and someone whose work I have always secretly wanted to read. Finally – though I could have read her short story anthology The Beach at Galle Road – I managed to find the advanced reader copy of her brand spanking new debut novel Remind Me Again What Happened.

Though this book is probably something that I personally would not have noticed without Jo's name on it, I very much enjoyed reading it. The story alternates between three different perspectives: that of the main character named Claire, her husband named Charlie, and their long time best friend, Rachel. Claire – who up to this point had been an international journalist – developed Japanese encephalitis transmitted by a mosquito bite acquired in Jamil Nadu. She wakes in a hospital in the Florida Keys with no idea how she arrived, with her life now characterized by seizures and extreme memory loss - the result of temporal lobe damage – and with Charlie and Rachel acting very strange around her. She cannot remember a large chunk of time that spans across years of her life, and though she is able to piece together some things with boxes of letters, photos, and notes from her articles, she can't help but sense a mystery at the center of her world. Through these three perspectives, we catch fragments of Claire's memory as well as the true feelings of Charlie and Rachel, but we struggle with Claire to find out what she was really doing on all of her journalism trips across the world.

In this book, anyone can tell that Jo had a lot of fun playing with both the movement of time and that of relationships. She keeps the reader hooked into the mystery of Claire's "black hole" in her memory, and pushes the boundaries of the social world we as humans interact in on the daily. It is entertaining, enlightening, and a truly enjoyable read. Congratulations, Jo!