Sunday Salon: The Woman Who Can't Forget

Free Press © 2008, 263 pages

It's no surprise that Jill Price has become the go-to girl in her family for reminders about birthdays and anniversaries: she's incapable of forgetting them. Given a date from 1980 on--her memory before she was fourteen is spottier--she can rattle off a laundry list of her activities on that day and provide headline news as well, provided she was aware of the event at the time. Her memory works in reverse, too: given an event, she can tell you its date and significance in her own life. Her extraordinary memory is limited to the autobiographical, however. She is not one of those savants who can memorize long lists of prime numbers or the value of pi to hundreds of places. And in fact her aptitude for rote memorization of that sort is relatively poor, which proved problematic for her in school.

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