Before I Go to Sleep

“The bedroom is strange. Unfamiliar. I don’t know where I am, how I came to be here. I don’t know how I’m going to get home.”

The opening lines of Before I Go to Sleep establish Christine’s first-person narrative voice. Her tone is terse and urgent, creating a sense of tension from the start. Readers are immediately immersed in Christine’s daily sense of disorientation as she wakes with amnesia, unable to identify where she is or who she is with.

“The face I see looking back at me is not my own. The hair has no volume and is cut much shorter than I wear it, the skin on the cheeks and under the chin sags; the lips are thin, the mouth turned down. I cry out, a wordless gasp that would turn into a shriek of shock were I to let it, and then notice the eyes. The skin around them is lined, yes, but despite everything else, I can see that they are mine. The person in the mirror is me, but I am twenty years too old. Twenty-five. More.”

Christine describes her shock as she wakes believing she is in her twenties and is confronted with the reflection of a middle-aged woman. The critical language Christine uses to describe her sagging chin, thin lips, and lined skin expresses her struggle to accept the ravages of time. While aging is a natural part of the human condition, Christine feels it has happened to her overnight.

“I am an adult, but a damaged one. It would be easy for this man to take me somewhere, though I don’t know what he would want to do. I am as vulnerable as a child.”

The man Christine describes here is Dr. Nash, but this statement could equally apply to the man who is pretending to be Christine’s husband. Christine’s amnesia makes her an easy target for others to exploit. With no memories to refer to, she is forced to trust that people are who they purport to be.