Bethany C. Morrow's MEM

Why is memory this way? Why isn't it content to hurt you once? Why must it remind you of all the times you've been hurt before?

What if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but set in an alternate Montreal in the early 20th century with a strange and analog version of that technology? But what if the painful memories scrubbed from one's mind not only assumed human form but assumed your human form and could sort of be interacted with by others, a la Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man? And what if we got a whole short novel of same as narrated by one of those embodied ambulatory memories, permanently 19 years old and something of a celebrity because she's not like those other embodied ambulatory memories, she's actually self-aware, makes new memories and has lived an independent life of her own for the last 20 years?

Head spinning yet? It's gonna spin some more.

Bethany C. Morrow's Mem is the firsthand account of one of these embodied ambulatory memories, called "mems", who has led a somewhat different experience than the rest of her kind does. Generally what happens to make a mem is that an obscenely rich person who feels plagued by a particularly unpleasant memory pays an exorbitant sum to a Montreal clinic to have that memory extracted, creating an eerie and uncanny but very, very limited duplicate of the rich person: it looks almost exactly like that person* and to a very small extent it moves around and might even sound like that other person, but since the mem is trapped forever in the original's bad memory, all it can do sort of pantomime the original experience on and on until its physical form wears out. Mems are kind of weird to have around, so mostly they are kept by the clinic in an underground facility called the Vault, where they live out their weird little not-lives in dormitories housing others of their very specific kind, i.e. most people who undergo this treatment have done so more than once, creating more than one of these weird echoes of themselves, so each person's collection of mems shares a dormitory.

Our mem, however, officially referred to as "Dolores Extract No. 1" to designate that she is the first mem created for a person named Dolores, was different right from the start. Visually she is and remains a perfect copy of her original at the age at which she was extracted; the same tone of brown skin, the same vividly copper-colored hair -- a sign from the moment of her creation that something unusual had occurred. Not only that, DE1 was aware of herself as a person, capable of expressing wants and needs, remembered incidents and conversations and overall just really seemed like she might actually be a person. Eventually, her creator decided to release her into the world to live as such a person, under his and his wife's help and guidance. DE1 first lived with them but eventually moved into an apartment of her own, furnished fully with help from the colleague's wife Camilla (who very early on adopted DE1 as a kind of daughter, for reasons that seem entirely not-sad or sinister at first). Not long before our story begins, DE1 gets fixated on a movie, going to see it multiple times a day for a week and deciding to model herself on the movie's heroine a bit, even to taking on her name of Elsie.

As the novel begins, however, Elsie has been recalled to the Vault with no explanation. Having no legal status as an autonomous being, she has little choice in the matter and complies, and it's all a huge shock. For 20 years she has not only enjoyed considerable autonomy, but also been a bit of a celebrity -- the Mem who Remembers, feted at parties, written about, studied, admired (it helps to be permanently 19) -- but now she is not even a person. The clinic staff make little or no eye contact with her, are unambiguously uncomfortable in her presence even before she tries to have conversations with them, and quickly stick her in the dormitory where other Dolores Extracts live, currently occupied only by a very late mem, very faded and discolored and just lying in a fetal ball on a bed, only to "expire" that very night. Imagine watching a pale and shuddering copy of yourself -- or rather, of the person of whom you are also a copy -- just fade out and die before your eyes...

But there is worse in store for our Elsie, like the reason she's been summoned back to the Vault. The technology that made her has continued in its development, and her Source wants to take advantage of one that poses an existential threat to Elsie, who is, after all, her Source's property to dispose of as she will. Tears in the rain.

All of this gets resolved in unexpected ways as Elsie comes to a new understanding of herself, including why she isn't like other mems, is treated with a fair amount of physical violence, and teeters on the brink of a doomed love affair. I wonder if Bethany C. Morrow ever thought about writing for the soaps. She'd have been brilliant. Which to say there is a lot of High Emotional Drama to this story.

I stumbled across this looking through my "included with your subscription" selection on Audible, so this is another novel I listened to late at night when I couldn't sleep.  Narrator Soneela Nankani and her pleasant, sweet voice were ideal for this; nice to listen to, but not so much so that I fell asleep, though this was largely due to the Drama. Nankani wrang every last bit of it out without getting too melodramatic, and proved a perfect match for this story, with a light and delicate voice that sounds like a 19-year-old's might, but with a performance that actually sells that the character is twice as old as she appears, and is realizing that she'll just keep getting older without aging, even as everybody she has known gets left behind by time... or will they?

*Usually a bit paler, less vividly colored all around, like an old color photo that's starting to fade out, except of course color photography isn't a thing yet because this memory-extracting technology was developed at the dawn of the 20th century.