Confessions of a Memory Eater

"Complicated, cool and vulnerable at the same time...you can't help falling for Pagan Kennedy's characters."—Stephen Dubner, The New York Times

Once a brilliant historian with a promising academic future, Win Duncan is at a crossroads in his career when he is mysteriously summoned by Litminov, a wild but brilliant chemist from his college days. Litminov has made millions since, and has bought a pharmaceutical company solely to develop MEM, an experimental drug that gives one the ability to recall life’s best memories with crystal clarity. Duncan becomes a beta tester and loses himself to the most delicious moments of his past—those precious few years with his mother who died tragically when he was just a child; ecstatic sex with his wife when they first fell in love—until he discovers the dark side effects of a drug that turns the past into pornography and renders the present useless.

A proven master of underground lit, beat fiction and narrative non-fiction, Pagan Kennedy takes on America’s obsession with the idealized past with freshness, wit, and an uncanny ability to measure the pulse of post-modern culture.

Pagan Kennedy is the author of seven books. The most recent, Black Livingstone, was a New York Times Notable Book and a winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Her novel Spinsters won a Barnes & Noble Discover Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. Her articles appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Spin, and Salon.