Before I Go To Sleep – S.J. Watson

Before I Go To Sleep has been on my shelves for years, as a kind of anti-recommendation pick – I feel like every person I know who’s read it has recommended I steer clear. But I’m a contrarian at heart, and I just couldn’t shake my fascination with the conceit. It’s like a mystery-thriller version of 50 First Dates-style amnesia.

The narrator of Before I Go To Sleep, Christine, has a strange kind of acquired memory loss. Every night, while she sleeps, her memory re-sets. Every morning, when she wakes up, Ben has to explain to her that she’s his wife, what has happened to her, and how she came to be married to him.

That all sounds lovely, but here’s the thing: can Christine trust Ben’s answers?

I’m telling you, the first chapter of Before I Go To Sleep is an absolute banger. We meet Christine, Ben, and a Dr Nash who is trying to help Christine without Ben’s knowledge. The good doctor gives Christine her journal to read and hopefully jog some of her memories out of storage. On the very first page, Christine has written: DON’T TRUST BEN. Isn’t that tantalising?

Day by day, Christine records what happens in her own words out of Ben’s sight. She starts to compare her own records to what he tells her each day, and some cracks start to show. Dr Nash helps her along each step of the way, and takes her to significant places from her past in the hopes of evoking memories that have been long-buried. It feels very similar to Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient, in a lot of ways. There’s the overly intimate doctor-patient relationship, the inaccessible answers trapped in a woman’s past, and the man who is definitely shifty but you can’t quite put your finger on why.

Before I Go To Sleep is also a portrait of a marriage – one in very unusual and strained circumstances. It’s actually quite difficult to put yourself in the characters’ shoes, and ponder what it would be like to become a caregiver for your spouse, or (especially in the final act) what it would be like to become completely dependent on the person you married. I think it’s in that scary premise that Watson finds the horror: there’s no scary technology or monsters under the bed, and yet in the haunted domesticity of Christine and Ben’s life, you’ll find yourself afraid for her.

My only real bugbear was how obvious it was that Before I Go To Sleep was written by a man, despite being narrated by a woman. Even with the conveniently androgynous initials for the author’s name on the cover, as soon as I read Christine’s first description of her own naked body, I immediately thought “there’s no way ‘S.J.’ is a woman”. I can’t even put my finger on exactly why I knew it to be true, other than it just didn’t sound like the way a woman would describe herself (and that feeling was compounded by a later scene where Christine experiments with touching herself). The vibes were off.

Before I Go To Sleep was Watson’s debut novel, so it was kind of a big swing for him to write from the point-of-view of a woman living with a disability he doesn’t have himself, anyway. Apparently, he scribbled scenes in between shifts as an NHS audiologist, which is impressive, even if he didn’t quite stick the landing.

Other than that, Before I Go To Sleep is a well-executed version of what could have been a schlocky psychological thriller, with unexpected depths and surprisingly few foibles. Nuts to everyone who tried to steer me away from it; I thought it was (mostly) great!

My favourite Amazon reviews of Before I Go To Sleep:

• “The only way you could possibly give this book more than 1 star is if you read a chapter and woke up the next day and forgot you read that chapter.” – Ray Guillet
• “For no reason I can come up with, the author saw fit to bombard his readers with his protagonist’s overtly sexual thoughts. Call me crazy, but if my world was turned upside down every morning, and the very structures to which I was clinging were on shaky ground, I would hardly find it a fitting time to explore my lady parts.” – Dusty
• “Ugh. The blurbs on this book were chock full of “impossible to put down,” “riveting,” etc. I put it down. Actually, I just dropped down the garbage chute.” – K. Terr
• “By the time I reached the conclusion, I hated Christine, the protagonist, and hoped that her fake husband Ben /Mike would murder her, so I could stop reading this drivel.” – Elaine Bolynn
• “Sadly, I can remember it after sleeping.” – Finikky