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A review by waclements7
MEM by Bethany C. Morrow
5.0
This is a pretty amazing book. I could be reading way more into it than the author intended. A summary of the basic plot is given with the book—I’m not particularly good at coherent and cohesive summaries. What I find so compelling about this book is that while setting it in an alternative Montreal where there is no racism, it seems to address it in an entirely different way. Mems are memory extractions from their “source,” the true original. They are a way for the source to get rid of unwanted memories, for whatever reason: they are too traumatic, too sad, or too difficult to deal with. The problem lies in the fact that when too many memories are extracted, the source fractures.
Dolores Extract #1 is an extraordinary Mem because she is self-aware—she knows she is a mem but has grown beyond that, and unlike any of the other mems, she has lived outside of the vault for most of her existence—she is the only mem capable of doing this, as the others are sort of on continuous replay of their particular extracted memory. The other mems eventually fade out and “die.” Dolores Extract #1 has given herself her own name, Elsie, and from the very beginning her skin was darker than that of her source, so in a way she is the more solid and real of the two—she isn’t faded at all and it’s this difference which possibly makes her different from the other mems.
When Dolores/Elsie is required to return to the vault and leave her outside life, she sees the condition of the other extractions from their original source, Delores, and it is even more obvious she isn’t like them at all. In the meantime, the legal question of who really owns the mems and the ethics of rewriting over an existing mem to prevent further fragmentation has started occurring. One man even goes so far as to take a mem his elderly mother had extracted for him to remember her by and rewriting the mem with _his_ own memory—his memory will have a female form but he had a “free” extraction with no danger of his having an issue of fragmentation.
The whole concept of this memory extraction and fragmentation of the source is fascinating in itself. By taking racism out of the picture, it makes it easier to see how racism and people’s memories of it are fragmented and rewritten to suit their own purposes and to form their own narratives, and how easily they can be controlled by others. Elsie is the one true memory who isn’t erased.
This is such a complex book when you really start to get into it. This is just my interpretation and could be way off base. The author says that there are a lot of misconceptions about racism in Canada, and yes, it did exist, but she wanted Elsie to exist in a world where it didn’t. I think I will definitely need to read this more than once.
Highly recommend.
Dolores Extract #1 is an extraordinary Mem because she is self-aware—she knows she is a mem but has grown beyond that, and unlike any of the other mems, she has lived outside of the vault for most of her existence—she is the only mem capable of doing this, as the others are sort of on continuous replay of their particular extracted memory. The other mems eventually fade out and “die.” Dolores Extract #1 has given herself her own name, Elsie, and from the very beginning her skin was darker than that of her source, so in a way she is the more solid and real of the two—she isn’t faded at all and it’s this difference which possibly makes her different from the other mems.
When Dolores/Elsie is required to return to the vault and leave her outside life, she sees the condition of the other extractions from their original source, Delores, and it is even more obvious she isn’t like them at all. In the meantime, the legal question of who really owns the mems and the ethics of rewriting over an existing mem to prevent further fragmentation has started occurring. One man even goes so far as to take a mem his elderly mother had extracted for him to remember her by and rewriting the mem with _his_ own memory—his memory will have a female form but he had a “free” extraction with no danger of his having an issue of fragmentation.
The whole concept of this memory extraction and fragmentation of the source is fascinating in itself. By taking racism out of the picture, it makes it easier to see how racism and people’s memories of it are fragmented and rewritten to suit their own purposes and to form their own narratives, and how easily they can be controlled by others. Elsie is the one true memory who isn’t erased.
This is such a complex book when you really start to get into it. This is just my interpretation and could be way off base. The author says that there are a lot of misconceptions about racism in Canada, and yes, it did exist, but she wanted Elsie to exist in a world where it didn’t. I think I will definitely need to read this more than once.
Highly recommend.