Remember Me?
Discovering My Mother as She Lost Her Memory
Shobna Gulati
Having read it
★★★★★
A brilliant memoir that is honest, heartfelt and insightful about some of her own experiences through life so far and the realities, difficulties, emotions and family tensions of looking after and caring for a parent that gets a few hard knocks throughout their life and then has to live with dementia in their final years. Sharing stories like these help us all and, as Shobna writes, [...] we all have the power to change other people’s understanding of the world by sharing recollections and records of our own lived experiences. Our collective memories profoundly add to the richness of existence.
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A good passage
I was beyond thrilled at getting the dinnerladies job. It just so happened that Judy Hayfield, the casting director of Coronation Street, had met me some months before, for an audition to play Mike Baldwin’s ‘fancy woman’. I hadn’t been successful in that instance because, despite my real age of 31, I looked too young (you see, Brown don’t frown). But Judy had said she wouldn’t forget me and she kept her word. Unbeknownst to me, Victoria had been asking around at Granada for a girl with a playing age of 23 plus, of my heritage with a soft Lancashire accent, and Judy put me top of that list. When I finally met with Vic, well, we got on ‘reet good’. I’m going to call her Vic, because that’s how she introduced herself to me from day one of filming, while she made me a brew.
A second good passage
Asha Gulati [Shobna’s mum] was very frugal. She had always had a specific way of brewing tea, with a strict ratio of two bags to three cups. You would have to warm the teapot first, swill hot water round, empty, then fill again with rolling, boiling water up to the top hole (God forbid if you underpowered). After the tea was brewed, she removed the tea bags after squeeing out every last drop, and piled them up by the sink, later cutting them open and spreading the tea leaves in the garden as compost and to keep the cats away. Thriftiness made up the very texture of her being.
A third good passage
Mum [Asha Gulati] was indeed the personification of the meaning of her name: hope. She gave me that ‘brimful of Asha’.