Much twenty-first-century young adult literature written by women and featuring teenage girls has taken up the theme of memory loss. Typically, the protagonist’s amnesia is related to some kind of trauma, an accident of some kind—anything from falling on the steps and hitting your head to a devastating car crash.
Here are some notable examples:
Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (2007)
Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008)
Cat Patrick, Forgotten (2011)
Michelle Hodkin, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (2012)
Megan Miranda, Hysteria (2013)
Natalie Richards, Six Months Later (2013)
Shelly Crane, Wide Awake (2013)
E. Lockhart, When We Were Liars (2014)
Jennifer Armentrout, Don’t Look Back (2014)
Alexandra Sirowy, The Creeping (2015)
Eileen Cook, With Malice (2017)
Kara Thomas, That Weekend (2021)
Some bloggers have noticed this trend, and there is an extensive Goodreads list about YA novels and amnesia. Indeed, lists are plenty (see Dobrez & Rutan and Lipinski), but critical explorations are few: Alison Waller’s “Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction” (2016) is the lone exception.*
Now the obvious question is: Why? Why amnesia? Why now? I think it’s safe to say that this literary trend doesn’t represent an actual epidemic of teenage amnesiacs. The teenage girl stricken with catastrophic memory loss is an allegory of something. But what? My argument here is that the amnesia trope represents the especially profound identity dislocations of the teenage years, dislocations to which twenty-first-century teens are increasingly susceptible because of social media. I’ll end by suggesting, moreover, that the trope of amnesia may represent, more broadly, a model of subjectivity that philosopher Catherine Malabou has articulated in the title of her most recent (and fascinating) book, The Ontology of the Accident (2012). These YA novels are about amnesia most obviously, but they are also about the precipitating accident—an accident that says something about who we fundamentally are.
AMNESIA AND ADOLESCENCE
First, and most obviously, amnesia articulates the wrenching changes of adolescence, changes in personality, in friendships, and in relationships with parents and siblings. In many cases, the protagonist’s forgotten years—the years that slip into the amnesiac black hole—include only the years since the onset of adolescence. The protagonists do remember who they were as children, suggesting that those years—those memories—form the core of an identity that can slip away in adolescence. What this means in terms of plot is that the protagonists—having forgotten their adolescent years as a result of an accident—come back to their lives, after their accident, as the children they once were. They come back to their teenage selves as outsiders, struggling to recognize this stranger as themselves.
In one of the best of the memory loss YA novels, Gabrielle Zevin’s Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, the eleventh-grade protagonist, Naomi, falls down some steps and her memories of herself subsequently stop at age twelve. Her doctor points out how “odd” it is that she has lost some things and not others, noting that “you have everything before puberty, but nothing after” (68). As Naomi looks through things in her bedroom, trying to figure out who she’s been for the last four years, she finds a diary, and eagerly opens it, hoping to find some rich account of her interior life. It turns out, though, to be a food diary, an obsessive accounting of every morsel of food, every calorie; on the day Naomi scrutinizes, those calories add up to a grand total of 618. As she then comments, “I wondered if the former Naomi Porter had been . . . a complete and total jerk, someone that I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to know (44-5). Indeed, Naomi’s four lost teenage years are presented in the novel as having been twice lost: the second time, she lost herself to amnesia, but the first time, she lost her twelve-year-old self to an obsessive tabulating of food and calories.
The fiction about “teenage amnesiacs” thus offers some suggestions about what causes this break in identity—and the preoccupation with body image is something that has long bedeviled adolescent girls. But the recent spate of memory loss fiction signals something more. What makes adolescence a more profound break in the early twenty-first century than ever before—a rupture not a transition—is the omnipresence of social media.
FINDING IDENTITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA
*Available at Amazon (ad)
Finding themselves suddenly plunged into a life, an identity, they remember nothing about, the teen protagonists of these YA novels often turn to social media to figure out who they are. And like the writer of the food diary Naomi finds in Zevin’s Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, the “self” the teen finds on social media often seems like an alien being. Indeed, I argue that this turn to social media to find herself paradoxically allegorizes the teen’s earlier, first, loss of self to social media, her untethering from the continuity of identity shaped through her pre-teen years. Social media in this fiction doubly creates an amnesiac self. It not only cuts a teen off from the “real” world of people and places that have surrounded her from birth, but it creates a separate virtual self (in fact, often multiple, proliferating selves). These other virtual selves don’t have a past, don’t have memory—and they are thus unmoored from what had constituted the child before—the child before social media became a dominant force in their lives.
I think the prevalence of social media in teens’ lives is one important explanation for the pervasive trope of amnesia. Teens risk literally losing themselves to an alien online presence that seems disconnected, separate, from themselves. In many ways, one could argue that one of the most threatening presences on the internet is not the pedophile but one’s own virtual avatar. And one of the most pressing and disturbing question is: what will IT—that virtual self—do next? (The 2015 CNN documentary, #BeingThirteen: Inside the Secret World of Teens, offers an often- hair-raising look at teens and social media.)
When the newly-amnesiac protagonists of YA fiction go to social media to try to figure out who they are (obviously representing how crucial social media is to the shaping of a teen’s self), what they find evokes a strong instinctive response of “that’s not me.”
*Available at Amazon (ad)
In Natalie Richards’ Six Months Later, for instance, the protagonist Chloe wakes up one day and finds that the last six months are a complete blank. She turns to social media—Facebook and Twitter—but reading over what she’s posted makes her feel as if she has been “possessed.” “It’s just . . . wrong,” she thinks, “It’s like someone I don’t know at all—a stranger. The same stranger who smiles out at me from dozens of pictures I don’t remember taking” (64). While Chloe tries to find herself in social media, then, it manifests itself as the very space of that self’s loss.
*Available at Amazon (ad)
Jennifer Armentrout’s Don’t Look Back is another particularly interesting example. It follows the familiar pattern of amnesia fiction: the protagonist, seventeen-year-old Sam, suffers a trauma and loses her memory. From photographs and the people around her, she slowly pieces together a sense of who she was –discovering she has apparently become, as her brother puts it, “‘a terror to everyone who knew you’” (25-6). Just like other protagonists, she realizes she hates who she seems to have become in high school. Sam’s brother and her friends from childhood attribute her personality transformation to her new peer group, to her new best friend and the boy she started dating as a freshman in high school. In talking to one of her childhood friends (post-memory loss), she asks how she could have been friends “with someone like that,” and how she could have dated “someone like” that. She answers the question herself: “‘Because I was just like them’” (220). She lost herself to her new peer group—a source of adolescent alienation, of course, even in the days before social media.
Don’t Look Back articulates the extreme point of Sam’s alienation from herself, however, in a plot turn only possible in the era of smart phones and social media. She discovers a photograph of herself that went viral, apparently reaching everyone at her school (and even her parents). Her boyfriend had taken a photo of Sam giving him a blow job –and had then texted it to his friend, who then circulated it to a lot more people and before long it’s on everyone’s phone. Sam’s boyfriend took this photograph without her knowledge, although when she found out, she apparently forgave him and kept on dating him. When the now-amnesiac Sam discovers the fact of this viral picture (again), she is horrified—at what she did, at what her boyfriend did, and at the fact that she didn’t break up with him. This plot turn is resonant with the many layers of dissociation teens undergo: in a relationship with someone her old self would have despised, doing things with him she would never have done, Sam’s alienated self is then doubly objectified as someone other than “herself” in the viral photo, taken without her knowledge or permission. The fact of Sam’s split “self” is represented both in what she’s doing and in the fact that it is out there, literally beyond herself circulating, in digital media—without her consent and (for a while) even her knowledge. As Sam says, quite aptly, after discovering this photograph (again): “‘It’s like I have an alien living in my body’” (278).
Peers and social media (two obviously interconnected forces) represent one way, then, in which teens become “amnesiacs”—cut off, alienated, from who they were before adolescence. Just like the girl Gabrielle discovers in the food diary in Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, and the person incarnate in the Facebook and Twitter posts in Six Months Later, the viral picture of Sam in Don’t Look Back has nothing at all to do with who she was before, who she was through the long and formative years of her childhood.
THE BODY’S DESIRE
A second way in which YA memory loss novels figuratively pose the teen years as a kind of amnesia—as, in the words of Sam, “a vast empty hole where all my memories . . . should’ve been” (Armentrout, Don’t Look Back 13)—is in their emphasis on the body—a body separate from mind and memory. In the absence of a continuous identity grounded by memory, most of the protagonists of amnesiac YA novels grasp as a kind of truth their feelings of intense desire, usually for someone whom they discover was not part of their accepted social circle pre amnesia. Indeed, this feeling of desire is often the only true, reliable thing these teen protagonists feel they have—the only thing that is not uncanny, strange. If they find only an “alien” when they turn to diaries or social media, the teenage protagonists of memory loss fiction seem to find the truth when they turn to their own bodies.
This notion, though, that there is truth in the desire of the body (like the turn to social media), allegorizes precisely what causes the break in identity in the teenage years, when unruly impulses often wipe out what one was before. But unlike the “self” found in social media, where the online persona of Six Months Later and the viral photograph of Don’t Look Back are intransigently alien, physical desire in these novels for the most part appears as a source of authentic truth. Awakening in a kind of vacuum—again, to quote Sam from Don’t Look Back, in a “black void where nothing existed” (4)—feelings of desire for a particular boy, unconstrained by memory, mostly turn out to be reliable: the body’s desire is proposed as a source of authenticity.
Desire is a truth of the body that is on the one hand a powerful force of self-discovery but also dangerous—shaping for its teen protagonists a sexual identity as the stable ground of identity. The dangers of this rest not least in the fact that physical desire, bodily affect, is not in the least bit stable although these novels mostly pretend that it is. Desire can also, of course, as easily lead you to a place that’s not “you” as to a place that is. Zevin’s Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac is the only novel I read that warns against the dangers and ephemerality of desire. The feelings the protagonist, Naomi, experiences during her period of amnesia fade as her memory comes back, and she realizes that she loves the boy she took as her best friend, the boy with whom she shares a long past and lots of memories. The desired boy of her amnesiac period is a stranger, one similarly without a past—and they both realize that their shared inhabiting of the present was the only thing they had in common—and that it wasn’t enough. But, as I said, Memoirs is an outlier here. Desire is in every other novel a source of authentic self-discovery, obscuring how it is itself a source of identity fracture, and thus generative of the trope of amnesia. (And I have to add that in this way, YA fiction for girls is continuing the longstanding romance and female gothic convention, in which the heroine’s desire for the mysterious and forbidding stranger almost always turns out to be legitimated: he loves her, they get married.)
ACCIDENTS, AMNESIA, AND SELFHOOD
*Available at Amazon (ad)
I want to end by gesturing briefly to philosopher Catherine Malabou’s thought-provoking book, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012), which I think helps extend the significance of the trope of amnesia beyond the particular moment of adolescence. And, indeed, amnesia has figured in some recent adult fiction—notably Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (2015) and S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep (2008). Malabou argues that we must incorporate into theories of selfhood the always-present possibility of accident, of a catastrophic change in who we are. She gives examples of brain injuries and brain degeneration (as in Alzheimer’s disease) that utterly change a person, which render someone alien to themselves as well as everyone around them. But she points out that the mundane movement from infancy and then into old age also make a person other than herself. Both injury and what we consider “normal” development, then, involve what Malabou eloquently describes as a “deserting of subjectivity, the distancing of the individual who becomes a stranger to herself . . . who no longer recognizes herself, who no longer remembers her self” (6). Since we are all always susceptible to such injuries, and since we all age, Malabou goes on to argue that “the power of annihilation hides within the very constitution of identity”; she continues that it is a very “signature” that the “law of being” always “appears to be on the point of abandoning itself, escaping” (37). We experience that “annihilation,” that “abandonment” as we move from infancy to childhood, childhood to adolescence, and, often more tragically, as we age.
That YA memory loss novels merge brain injury with adolescence redoubles the idea that identity contains within it, always, the possibility of its own abandonment. The self perennially harbors the possibility of its own radical dislocation. In Natalie Richards’ Six Months Later, the protagonist, Chloe, replies to someone at one point “automatically, the words coming from a place I can’t find, a great empty space in me where I’m sure a memory should be” (15). Malabou’s theory of the self suggests that this is true for all of us—that there’s a “great empty space” in each of us that marks the always-potential evacuation of what we, most of the time, think is our “self.”
**Waller discusses Memory (1987) by Margaret Mahy, The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008) by Mary E. Pearson, and Forgotten (2011) by Cat Patrick.
Works Cited
Armentrout, Jennifer. Don’t Look Back. Little, Brown, 2014.
Dobrez, Cindy, and Lynn Rutan. “Who Am I? What Happened? Teen Memory Loss Novels.” The Booklist Reader, August 1, 2016. https://www.booklistreader.com/2016/08/01/bookends-childrens-literature/who-am-i-what-happened-teen-memory-loss-novels/.
Malabou, Catherine. The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, translated by Carolyn Shread. Polity, 2012.
Lipinski, Andrea. “Mind Wipes and Missing Memories in Teen Fiction.” New York Public Library, March 15, 2016, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/03/15/missing-memories-teen-fiction.
Richards, Natalie. Six Months Later. Sourcebooks Fire, 2013.
Waller, Alison. “Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction.” Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, edited by Sebastian Groes. Palgrave, 2016. 286-91.
Zevin, Gabrielle. Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac. Square Fish, 2007.
