Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin

Published by ‎ Scribner on March 1, 2022

Tell Me an Ending imagines a future technology that allows the pinpoint erasure of selected memories. People can elect to remember that they had a memory erased or can choose to have no memory of the procedure that wiped out a bit of their past. A lawsuit compels Nepenth, the company that performs the erasures, to tell the latter group that their memories have been erased. Nepenth is also forced to restore the memories of those who wish to get them back. The novel tells the stories of several characters who either know or learn that a part of their past has been deleted.

The concept is intriguing. Curiosity creates a natural dilemma as Nepenth’s “self-confidential” patients (the ones who choose to forget the procedure) wonder what they’ve forgotten and why they wanted to forget. Some might want to recover the memories to reduce the anxiety of not understanding their full past. At the same time, if the memories were so unbearable that they wanted to erase them, does it make sense to have them restored, only to be tormented by them again? A key character suggests a possible answer: taking away memories also erases identity. How do you know who you are unless you remember who you have been? If you did something bad and wanted to forget about it, how do you safeguard against repeating your past when you don’t know what you did?

Most of the key characters have had the procedure and are wondering whether they should reclaim their memories. When Mirande is offered a memory restoration, she has no idea what she suppressed. Her husband Finn suspects that Mirande had an affair with David while Finn was working in Singapore. Is that what Mirande erased? Would that explain why David is suddenly back in their lives?

William did something during his employment as a police officer that he paid to forget because he couldn’t live with the guilt. It’s not legal for cops to get memory wipes (they need to remember evidence), nor is it legal to erase memories of crimes, but William does it anyway.

Oscar is traveling the world, convinced that someone is pursuing him. He leaves for a new destination every time he believes he’s been found. He has a necklace made of teeth but he doesn’t remember how he acquired it. Nor does he remember his childhood. Oscar is an example of someone whose life was clearly not made better by forgetting his past.

Mei is linked to a different character in a way that Jo Harkin conceals from the reader for much of the novel. She is a failed college student who has vague memories of doing something in Amsterdam. She travels to Amsterdam to reconstruct the missing event.

A couple of other characters, Noor and Louise, work for Nepenth. The organizing plot revolves around Louise’s involvement in a secret project that goes beyond the simple removal of an unwanted memory by experimenting with a more ambitious goal. Louise is dealing with the consequences of that project while Noor, who has been kept in the dark, pokes into Louise’s secretive actions. Louise also had a project of her own that involved making memory deletion available to people who seemed to need it but were not lawfully entitled to it.

Tell Me an Ending explores the moral complications of selective memory erasure. If guilt and remorse are necessary and useful consequences of bad behavior, is it socially harmful to allow the suppression of memories of misconduct? Noor and Louise focus the novel’s ethical theme near the novel’s end as they argue about the benefits and detriments of Louise’s decision to substitute her own judgment for society’s judgment as to who should be entitled to a memory wipe. The debate is about the shades of gray that complicate every moral judgment, as well as the single shade of green that Louise earns from giving people pain relief who aren’t legally entitled to it. Noor has her own reasons for feeling guilty. The two characters lay guilt trips on each other, inviting the reader to decide which one makes the better case.

Apart from Oscar and William, the stories of the individual characters feel incomplete. While the individual stories are a useful means of exploring the ethical ramifications of memory erasure, Harkin shortchanges the emotional development of the characters who cope with the aftermath of Nepenth’s procedures. The novel as a whole is less than the sum of its incomplete parts. The eventual focus on Louise and Noor is unfortunate, as they are the least interesting characters. Still, I give Harkin credit for her thorough discussion of the moral ramifications of a procedure that neuroscientists are likely to learn to perform in the not-so-distant future.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS