In her first book “Remember Me?: Discovering My Mother As She Lost Her Memory”,
from Coronation Street, dinner ladies and Loose Women star, Shobna Gulati, captures the powerful emotions that these memories hold to both Shobna and her mother; secrets they had collectively buried and also the concealment of her mother's condition.
In December 2019, soon after her mother's untimely death, Shobna discovered bags and bags stuffed with press clippings, spanning Shobna’s life from childhood right up until her mother died, in her family home. As Shobna sat in the midst of a sea of clippings she began to think over her mother's life and the stories that had only begun to surface from her past as she lost her to dementia.
In this moving yet humorous memoir, a daughter sets out to reclaim her mother's past after her death, and in turn, discovers a huge amount about herself and their relationship. What ensues is a story of cultural assimilation, identity and familial shame. Shobna shared an excerpt from her book for the readers of Asian Voice. It is as follows:
“This is a story of things that are lost, but can also be found in the most unexpected of places. It is a story of the things you remember and the things you had once forgotten, the stories we then tell ourselves and what we choose to share with others. It is my story and it is my mother’s and it is about being her daughter. It is about the function of memory within the human construct of time, where we give our daily lives a beginning, a middle and an end. It is also a story about the assumption of shame and the presumption of it too, racial bias and prejudice, based only on the colours of our brown skins. We spend our entire lives trying to figure out the answers to questions that are presented to us: Who are we when no one else is around? Whose lives have we affected? How did it end up like this? Have we done the right thing? How will we be remembered? These questions enter my mind, as I remember my life and my mother’s, and wonder how she would want to be remembered. I believe I have a clear idea of who I’ve become and in turn
discovered who my mother was, both to me but also as a woman in her own right. But the truth is, we never really know ourselves or each other fully; as our memory is an imaginative, creative, destructive and selective place. The memories the brain builds and designs are never quite representative of the life we have lived, it’s not even in the stuff we collect and leave behind. As my mother’s memory began to fall apart, I began to see behind the created memories and I found a woman who was able to make clear choices grown from a deep, quiet love for her husband and family, to live her life fully with fairness and sincerity even when her world fell apart.”
