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Eternal Sunshine is one of the few movies that can still make me cry on the umpteenth rewatch, specifically the scene where Joel clings to the bed and . Jo Harkin's Tell Me an Ending was able to scratch that same spec-fic itch of desperation.

The company Nepenthe can erase short-term memories (not entire relationships) in either a "self-informed" context where the patient is aware they had a memory erased but cannot recall the details or in a "self-confidential" process in which the patient is unaware the traumatic event and subsequent erasure ever happened. After a recent legal case, those self-confidential patients are informed they had their memory altered and are entitled to have those traumatic memories restored.

Thematically, the book explores the ethics of the technology, mental health, and trauma/trauma care. We see through various perspectives - a psychologist, a suspicious husband, a college dropout, a former cop, and someone who doesn't remember any of his long-term history. Some of them choose to remove memories of something that happened to them, and others choose to remove something they did.

I understand from the reviews many people did not like how these characters were only loosely strung together by their association with Nepenthe, but I really enjoyed that aspect. This isn't a story where multiple POV serves the purpose of telling a single story, but instead we have snippets of various character's lives and how they are affected by this opportunity for memory restoration. In the vein of Egan's The Candy House or Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch, some of these stories eventually tie together and others do not. It is indeed a little hard to remember the intricate details of their lives if you read this slowly, so despite the 400+ pages I highly recommend consuming this as a binge read.

Sometimes you find yourself in an environment where there is no ethical absolute. This novel deals with this messiness beautifully; I'll be thinking about these characters for a long time.