Before I Go to Sleep, by S. J. Watson

Christine wakes one morning to find herself sleeping next to a stranger. She does not remember how she wound up in bed with this older man– she must have been very drunk– and she is dismayed to see that he wears a wedding ring. When she finds her way to the bathroom, the woman in the mirror is at least twenty years too old.

It takes a while for Christine to come to grips with the truth. She is no longer a college student but a middle-aged woman. The man in the bed is Ben, her husband. Decades ago, while she was in her late twenties, Christine suffered a head injury that left her with an exceedingly rare form of amnesia. Every night her mind resets. She can make new memories but cannot retain them the next day. Ben patiently explains all of this– but of course he must explain it again the next morning, and the next, and the next.

And that would be that– a strange but directionless story, Groundhog Day meets Memento replayed in an endless loop– but for the phone call Christine receives. The caller claims to be her doctor. (Is he telling the truth? Christine cannot ask Ben, who has left for work.) Dr. Nash suggests that Christine look in the bottom of her bedroom closet. Though she is uneasy, Christine follows the doctor’s cryptic advice and finds a hidden journal. Its pages are filled with her own handwriting, and she has left a message for herself to find: “Don’t trust Ben.”

The atmosphere is tense throughout S. J. Watson’s debut. We learn early on that something isn’t right, that the pieces just don’t add up, but we are helplessly bound by Christine’s own limitations. As with the protagonist of Turn of Mind (another 2011 debut, reviewed here yesterday), mental disease has rendered our narrator unreliable, and the other characters do not seem to be entirely trustworthy, either. Someone is lying, but every step closer to the truth puts Christine in more danger– and even when we as readers figure out the mystery, there’s not a thing we can do but watch our heroine greet each new day with a blank slate, innocent of whatever perils she may have unearthed the day before. It is an absolutely nerve-wracking plot device that makes this an unusually strong thriller.

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