Perhaps not knowing who you were is much worse than not knowing who you are.  Mainly because who you are is fluid and changing, but who you were determines a lot of who you are and who you become.  So what happens when who you were is wiped clean?  Gone.

That’s what happens to 39-year-old Lucie.  She finds herself standing knee-deep in the San Francisco Bay and she has no idea who she is or how she got there.

A few days later a man, Grady, who claims to be her fiancé, comes to pick her up.  She doesn’t know him, but she finds an odd comfort in the idea of him.  She willingly goes back to her life in her old house with her old fiancé, but she can’t remember any of her own details.

What she finds over the course of a few weeks is that she can’t relate to the Lucie she discovers in her house.  That Lucie seemed hard and closed-off.  Present Lucie is open and yearning for truth about her past and who she is.

Jennie Shortridge’s novel deals with the delicacy of mental illness and amnesia, but it also illuminates it and makes it less taboo.  Shortridge created the characters, named after her grandparents, and put their story into motion after she read an article about a couple who faced a very similar situation when the man became an amnesiac and his fiancé went about trying to recover their relationship.  Shortridge suggests that maybe rather than recover a relationship with hidden crevices, perhaps it is a gift to be able to create a new one.

Love Water Memory has a healthy amount of suspense and the character development is flawless.  Grady, Lucie’s fiance, is warm and loving and also aloof and detached.  Though a combination that is easily found in nature, it is a very difficult one to write about convincingly.  Shortridge knew these characters well.