What is Remembered in the Novel Before I Forget

This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through links on my site, I may earn a commission at no cost to you. For more information, please see my disclosure policy.

In the novel Before I Forget, Cricket Campbell finds herself becoming a caregiver to her father, Arthur, who has Alzheimer’s. She is trading places with her older sister, Nina, who has accepted a job abroad.

Cricket has felt stuck for some time. She works for a boss who mainly views her self-help business through the enterprising telescope of dollar signs. And Cricket has grown disenchanted with all of it.

Cricket, 26, has been adrift ever since her boyfriend, Seth, was killed in a tragic accident on Catwood Lake. It was an accident she feels partly responsible for. Coming to terms with her feelings of culpability sends her back to the past she has avoided for a decade. Being at Catwood Lake with her father, all the knife-edged memories come back to haunt her.

Her parents divorced not long after Seth’s death, and Cricket spent her school years in the city with her mother and summers at the lake with her father. She has not been back to Catwood Lake, her father’s Adirondack home, for nearly a decade.

Cricket has held various dead-end jobs across the country, an obvious sign of capricious tendencies. Cricket had wanted to be a veterinarian, but ended up dropping out of college. This deeply disappointed her mother, but her father took the news with calm equanimity.

Instead of putting their father into a memory care facility, she decides to trade places with her older sister, Nina, and become their father’s caregiver. It seems daunting at first. Cricket wonders if she’s capable of being anyone’s caregiver. She can barely take care of herself and is directionless.

Her First Love

Catwood Lake is where Cricket first experienced love with Seth, and also where she lost him. It is where, in her grief, she said some awful things to her father, and has never appropriately apologized. She hopes being back with him will bring them closer before she loses him altogether.

Cricket finds that she isn’t a bad caregiver, though she doesn’t follow her sister’s stringent daily routines. She enjoys spending time with her father, even though he doesn’t seem to recognize her.

At Catwood Lake, she meets Carl, a fifty-something neighbor who has befriended her father. Then there’s Paula, her childhood dance instructor, whom she meets up with again. Together, the three balance Arthur’s care as they trudge the sorrowful journey he’s destined to take and never return from.

Cricket had thought that when her father passed, she would be notified by phone call and have some degree of distance from the agonizing event. Now she realizes she will be the one present when it happens. There will be no layers of separation to shield her.

How They Spend Their Days Together

They fill their days watching the loons on the lake, swimming, and doing mundane tasks. She knows that Nina would have been more cautious and deliberate with her father’s care, but Cricket is content to let him sleep when he’s sleepy and do something fun when he’s awake. It is his disease, and she feels he should be allowed to follow his own path through it.

Then something strange happens. Arthur begins to foresee the future, a gift he accepts casually, as though he had known this ability would visit him all along. At first, they make a game of it. One day, they are practicing a form of divination through shadows as they sit by the lake.

Cricket says: “What do you think, Dad? What do the shadows mean?” First, he tells her that they shouldn’t be taken too seriously, that sometimes a shadow is just a shadow.

Then, he says, as though he’s already forgotten his last words, “Oh, he’s gone.”

“Who’s that?” she asks him.

“Your friend. The blond kid. He was just here, but he left when he saw you,” her father says.

Cricket instantly jumps up from her chair to run and look, as if Seth’s spirit could be frolicking around the boathouse.

Arthur the Oracle

When she tells Nina, Nina thinks that it’s silly. That their father should have other things to do with the time he has left. But what should that time be measured by, she wonders. What meaning should it have? Word gets around, and soon people are coming from all over to meet “the oracle.”

Cricket comes to think that the disease of Alzheimer’s doesn’t have to be entirely sad. Rather than seeing only loss and decline, she begins to notice the meaningful ways Arthur connects with the world as his memory fades.

This is how the author reframes the disease for us. And I found this shift, a reference to how we can also view a sad illness, to be uplifting, poignant, and down-to-earth.

Cricket finds herself moving past the usual fear and grief tied to dementia and begins seeing moments of joy, humor, and deeper connection. Even though her father doesn’t recognize her, these moments help her understand that their relationship can change rather than simply disappear.

To Grow, Forgive & Find Purpose

Through the story of Cricket and Arthur, the author suggests there may be ways to remain present even as conventional memory fades away. This symbolic twist prompts Cricket (and the reader) to reconsider the brain disease that is Alzheimer’s. To view it as not just a difficult loss, but as a different way of engaging with life.

This is a warm, touching, and funny portrait of how people confront change and loss, which we all face in our lifetimes. Without loss, how can you experience love? And without sadness, how can you feel joy? This story is about all of these things and more.

Before I Forget is both a homecoming and a farewell. I think I shall now look at this brain disease a little differently than I did before. It is to Tory Henwood Hoen’s credit that she has written about something so devastating in a way that we can all embrace with a little less fear.

Alzheimer’s is a tragic, strange, and confusing journey for anyone to embark upon. All that is remembered is forgotten. Memories are lost to a progressive, irreversible brain disease that is characterized by the gradual destruction of brain cells.

Over 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, this number is projected to rise to nearly 13 million.

About the Author

Tory Henwood Hoen is an American-Canadian novelist who grew up in Connecticut. She graduated from Brown University, spent a few years in Paris, and then spent 15 years in New York City. She now lives in Vermont with her daughter and two cats, and she’s an “SMBC” (solo mother by choice).

The Arc (February 2022) was her debut novel. Before I Forget (December 2025) was a December 2025 “Book of the Month” Selection, as well as the Reader’s Digest Book Club Pick.

You can learn more about this author on her website and find her on Instagram at @toryhenwoodhoen.

(Disclosure: I received this book free in exchange for my honest review.)