Billy Conn

The Garden of Lost Remembering Billy Conn

Memories are tricky. What if the memory is of something that happened more than ninety years ago? When does a memory that won't leave you alone become a haunting? Who is the tearfully pleading child whose voice she hears time and time again? The young volunteer on a reminiscence project is slowly drawn into the ever changing and uncertain world of the woman he visits. At first he is fascinated by the quirky and quixotic view of the previous century seen through the eyes of this former journalist. He struggles with her bewildering preoccupation with ideas of consciousness and self and the role that memory might play. He has to work hard to keep up with the peppering of episodes that have abandoned any sense of linearity in time in the lottery of her lucidity. Slowly her concern with what she thought she saw becomes his obsession, gradually submerging him in her world till neither of them is any longer sure if he is from her past or present, is a fiction or an aspect of a psychosis.