The Woman Who Can't Forget by Jill Price Page A

stay in our apartment in New York with my mom and dad and brother and all our relatives and my dad’s clients coming over all the time for the rest of my life, and I intensely envy people who have lived in the same home their whole lives. Before long, I was to move away from New York to the suburb of South Orange, New Jersey, and though that first move was not unduly upsetting, at some point in my years in South Orange, I developed a profound attachment to my home there. When my family later moved from there to Los Angeles, the trauma of that move may well have played a role in the way my memory began to intensify not long after.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Remains of the Days
    Home is the place where, when you have to go
there, they have to take you in.
    I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.
    â€”Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”
    T he old saying “home is where the heart is” does not even begin to express the degree of attachment I have felt to my homes. In fact, I have never left home. I was in the process some years ago of moving out on my own, to live with the man I’d fallen in love with and married, but that’s a story I’ll save to tell later.
    Early on, I became so deeply rooted to home that the thought of moving from my house absolutely terrified me. I also early on became intensely attached to what I call the artifacts of my life, from toys to records to notes from friends, and what was to become a vast storehouse of mementos. It seems that these two phenomena are interrelated: the need to keep things and the need to stay in the same place have been, I think, different facets of the intense dread I’ve had about change.
    There is an odd irony about this. Although I remember the days and places and conversations and events of so much of my life so well, from early on I have felt an urgent desire to hold on to those days and places and events—and also to the things of my life. I can’t say exactly why this is true, but I have found that holding on to the artifacts of my life gives me great comfort. Having actual things that are attached to the memories swirling in my head seems to make the strangeness of living in the past at the same time as the present less surreal.
    The irony of wanting to keep a hold on the places and the artifacts of my life makes me think about the great Twi
    light Zone episode about a man who loves to read so much that he just wants to escape from life so that he can read all day. One day he goes down into a bank vault to hide away and read while he should be working, and he is the only survivor of a nuclear Armageddon. When he comes out of the vault, the landscape around him is a wasteland, and he’s alone. At first he’s delighted, because he’ll get to read as much as he wants, but then he trips and his glasses fall off, and while he’s looking for them, he steps on them and crushes the lenses. There he is, with all the time he ever wanted for reading, and now he can’t see.
    My memory means I don’t need photographs to remind me of how my family and friends and my houses and home towns looked when I was growing up or to call to mind my favorite vacations and holidays. I can travel back to any home I’ve lived in and remember it vividly—taking it with me, in effect, when moving to a new one. Though one would think that would give me all the freedom in the world from any need to keep mementos or to keep a diary of key life events, it’s just the opposite.
    When I was three, I began to collect all the important items of my life, almost all of which I’ve kept. These included a small army of dolls, from a beloved collection of Madame Alexander dolls and Barbies, to the Sunshine Family and Dawn dolls, as well as the beloved doll carriage I received as a gift when I was seven. Then there is my host of stuffed animals, including 150 Beanie Babies. I amassed a treasure trove of