Can a long-forgotten memory of a horrible event suddenly resurface years later? How can we know whether a memory is true or false? Seven spellbinding cases shed light on why it is rare for a reclaimed memory to be wholly false. Here are unforgettable true stories of what happens when people remember what they've tried to forget -- plus one case of genuine false memory. In the best detective-story fashion, using her insights as a psychiatrist and the latest research on the mind and the brain, Lenore Terr helps us separate truth from fiction.

On autopsy, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient can weigh as little as 30 percent of a healthy brain. The tissue grows porous. It is a sieve through which the past slips. As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct—easy to hold. At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.

Spurred by old memories and a life-changing accident, Madison embarks on a cross-country adventure to reconnect with three very different men to reevaluate her past choices.

Courage yields unexpected surprises when Justin visits his school's dreaded lost and found. A witty, award-winning story about childhood fears from Bill Harley and Adam Gustavson. When Justin loses the special hat his grandmother made for him, he looks everywhere for it. Everywhere, that is, except the lost and found. Mr. Rumkowsky, the old school custodian, is the keeper of all the lost and found items, and everyone is afraid of him—including Justin. When he finally musters the courage to enter Mr. Rumkowsky's domain, he discovers a whole world of treasures. But things keep getting weirder and weirder, until way down at the bottom of Rumkowsky's giant box, Justin unearths something completely unexpected...

A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is. She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own--how well did she ever know them? Can You make up for a past you don't really remember? It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again. Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory. In Past Forgetting, Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she had: Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite remember: when her father was running MGM. In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotion? Is memory an act of reinvention? Do people reinvent rather than recollect? In Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.

Between 1913 and 1989 some four million South Africans were forcibly removed from their homes to enforce residential segregation along racial lines. This study records and interprets the memories of some of the Capetonians who were relocated as a result of the infamous Group Areas Act. Former resients of Windermere, Tramway Road in Sea Point, District Six, Lower Claremont, and Simon's Town narrate their experiences.

'Exquisite . . . a book for anyone with a loved one with dementia. In Montague's hands this landscape is rendered more bearable.' Irish Times 'A profoundly moving book . . . Jules Montague is writing about whatit is to be human and the surprising fragility of our sense of self.' Daily Mail Who do you become when your mind misbehaves? Neurologist Dr Jules Montague blends stories of her patients experiencing dementia, brain injury and other neurological disorder with profound insights on what makes us who we are. At once poignant and consoling, this revelatory book explores how we lose ourselves and those around us - and how we can be found again. Lost and Found is a fascinating and timely examination of happens to the person left behind when memories disappear, personality changes, and consciousness is disrupted.