Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for ExcellenceA provocative exuberant novel
about time memory desire and the imagination from the internationally bestselling and
prizewinning author of The Blazing World Memories of the Future tells the story of a young
Midwestern woman's first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her
mysterious neighbor Lucy Brite.As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her
dilapidated building S.H. aka Minnesota transcribes her neighbor's bizarre and increasingly
ominous monologues in a notebook along with sundry other adventures until one frightening
night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.Forty years later S.H. now a
veteran author discovers her old notebook as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel
while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various
texts S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since
forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time
and reframes its meanings in the present.Elaborately structured intellectually rigorous
urgently paced poignant and often wildly funny Memories of the Future brings together themes
that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of
memory gender mutability the violence of patriarchy the vagaries of perception the
ambiguous borders between sensation and thought sanity and madness and our dependence on
primal drives such as sex love hunger and rage.
