Alice Love

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist and focal consciousness of the novel
• Age: 39 in body, 29 in mind after a head injury and amnesia
• First appearance: Wakes on the gym floor after a fall in Chapter 1
• Core conflict: A ten-year memory gap forces her to confront the life she built—and no longer recognizes
• Key relationships: her husband, her older sister, three children, and a school principal she dates

Who They Are

At once naive and battle-hardened, idealistic and exacting, bold and apologetic, Alice is a woman split across a decade. Her amnesia turns an ordinary late-thirties life into a detective story about the self. She embodies the jolt and possibility of the Transformation of the Self, and her odyssey makes visible how Memory and Identity braid together: without memories, she moves through the same life with wholly different instincts, values, and loves.

Physical Description

Alice’s body becomes the first clue something fundamental has shifted; the mirror reads like a time-lapse of personality.

• At 29: Long brown hair; a soft, rounded figure; ragged, broken nails from gardening and DIY. Her casual, earthy look mirrors a cozy, domestic optimism.
• At 39: “Skinny,” flat stomach, visible ribs; a sharp blond bob; fine “spidery” lines around the eyes; C‑section scar and stretch marks; manicured hands. The controlled, polished exterior matches the hyper-competent persona she doesn’t remember choosing.

Personality & Traits

Alice’s psyche is doubled. The younger self looks outward with generosity and delight; the older self looks forward with strategy and grit. The novel uses this split not just to list differences, but to test which parts of adulthood are growth—and which are scar tissue.

• Romantic and guileless (29): She calls herself a “domestic goddess,” revels in small pleasures, and believes she’s “bloody besotted” with her husband. Evidence: she seeks reassurance playfully, takes people at face value, and leans on her big sister for guidance.
• Efficient and formidable (39): A committee-running “bull terrier,” a “caffeine junkie,” and sometimes “snooty,” she’s become the kind of woman who can run a school event with military precision—and who terrifies telemarketers. Others label her “tacky” or a “hard bitch,” signaling the defensive shell she’s grown.
• Vulnerable, then resilient: Amnesia makes her porous—she’s startled by her own children, confused by her home—yet this very tenderness allows reconciliation to begin.
• Perfectionism vs. warmth: Manicured hands and color-coded calendars promise control, but the 29-year-old’s warmth proves more effective at healing relationships than the 39-year-old’s mastery ever did.

Character Journey

Alice’s arc begins as an identity heist: her present has been stolen by her past. Horrified by the brittle life she wakes into, she tries to fix what is broken with the tools of her younger self—affection, curiosity, and open-handed trust. As she reconstructs the decade she cannot remember—the births of her children, the slow grind of marital resentment, the aching loss of her best friend—she recognizes how grief, busyness, and competitiveness hardened her. The flood of memory at “Mega Meringue Day” forces a reckoning: neither version alone is sufficient. In the Epilogue, she integrates competence without cruelty and tenderness without naivety, embodying the book’s quiet insistence on Forgiveness and Second Chances—for spouses, siblings, and, crucially, for oneself.

Key Relationships

• Nick Love: Their marriage charts The Evolution of Love and Marriage—from besotted newlyweds to embattled co-parents to cautious, wiser partners. Amnesia lets Alice meet her husband as if for the first time, stripping away scorekeeping and giving both a glimpse of what their love looked like before exhaustion and bitterness.
• Elisabeth: The sisters’ closeness has thinned into politeness, warped by Elisabeth’s grief over Infertility and the Longing for Family and Alice’s prickly busyness. Post-accident dependency reverses that drift: needing Elisabeth makes Alice attentive again, and Elisabeth’s bluntness becomes a strange mercy—naming truths Alice can’t yet remember.
• Madison Love, Tom, and Olivia: Motherhood is at first a horror of estrangement—she’s a stranger in her own kitchen. But as she studies each child’s quirks and fears, she re-falls in love with them, learning their rhythms the way the 29-year-old once learned her husband’s. The maternal bond is re-chosen, not merely remembered.
• Dominick Gordon: Kind, competent, and safe, he represents a gentler future built without the volatility of her marriage. Yet the pull toward her husband exposes the difference between compatibility and the deep, complicated loyalty of shared history.

Defining Moments

Alice’s turning points map the borders between the two selves—and the bridge she builds between them.

• Waking in the gym: In Chapter 1, she learns it’s 2008 and she’s nearly 40, not a glowing 29‑year‑old. Why it matters: The entire plot springs from this dislocation, which reframes ordinary middle age as a mystery to solve.
• The photo of the children: Faced with three smiling strangers who call her “Mum,” Alice feels terror rather than recognition. Why it matters: Love here becomes a verb—she must enact maternal care until memory catches up.
• The phone call with her husband: In Chapter 7, his hostile tone is the first incontrovertible proof that their marriage is broken. Why it matters: Shatters nostalgia and supplies a concrete antagonist—not a person, but a decade’s worth of miscommunication and fatigue.
• Mega Meringue Day: The smell of lemon meringue—her late best friend Gina Boyle’s signature—unlocks the decade at once. Why it matters: Memory returns not as a list but as a flood, entwining grief with identity and forcing Alice to choose integration over regression.

Essential Quotes

Once, when they were undoing their seat belts, Nick said (in answer to some fishing-for-compliments thing she’d just said), “Don’t be ridiculous, you goose, you know I’m bloody besotted with you.” This line crystallizes the early marriage: playful, affectionate, and mutual. It becomes a yardstick by which Alice measures what’s been lost—and what might still be recoverable if they relearn how to speak to each other without armor.

“Are these my . . . Are these my children?” The halting repetition captures raw disorientation. By voicing the unthinkable, Alice marks the beginning of a second motherhood—one built through attention, humility, and daily practice rather than memory alone.

“You’ll remember soon. It’s okay. It’s just that you and Nick aren’t together anymore.” Elisabeth said again, “You’re getting divorced.” Elisabeth’s unvarnished delivery both wounds and steadies. It exemplifies her role as truth-teller: she refuses to collude with denial, forcing Alice to confront reality while offering a sister’s steadiness beside it.

“You’ve lost your frown,” he said. “You always have this little frown right here, as if you’re concentrating, or worrying about something, even when you’re happy. Now it’s . . .” The missing word signals possibility. Others can see the gentler openness of the younger Alice resurfacing; the vanished frown becomes a visual shorthand for the softening that facilitates reconciliation.

“I’ll know when you get your memory back. The way you look at me. As soon as you remember, I’ll see it in your eyes.” This fear—that memory will bring back resentment along with facts—raises the story’s central risk. It suggests that remembering is not neutral; it can either reactivate old defenses or, if integrated, deepen empathy.