What We Remember, What We Forget: A Memoir in Memory

Category Winner in the 2025 Memoir Prize for Books (US)
Highly Commended in the 2024 Bridport Memoir Award (UK)

‘We are our memories. They are a repository of our lives.’

What We Remember, What We Forget by Siobhan Harvey is a personal narrative and poignant meditation on the power and peril of remembering – as well as of forgetting. Moving between childhood, early adulthood, imagination and the present, Harvey writes with honest intimacy about trauma, family and queerness; harm, silence and survival.

Interweaving life story with reflections on philosophy and psychology, Harvey considers how memory both wounds and sustains, and how it may be safely carried so as to create the life one wants.

Elegantly written, this is a powerful work about attention, language and the hard but fruitful labour of understanding. What We Remember, What We Forget asks: how should we retrieve our memories, and how can we trust what we find?

‘…memory is a creative endeavour: memory, the director’s cut; memory, a book of collected poems; memory, an exhibition of curated portraits; memory, a Surrealist retrospective.’