What We Remember, What We Forget
Category Winner in the 2025 Memoir Prize for Books (US)
Highly Commended in the 2024 Bridport Memoir Award (UK)
‘We are our memories. They are a repository of our lives.’
What We Remember, What We Forget by Siobhan Harvey is a personal narrative and poignant meditation on the power and peril of remembering – as well as of forgetting. Moving between childhood, early adulthood, imagination and the present, Harvey writes with honest intimacy about trauma, family and queerness; harm, silence and survival.
Interweaving life story with reflections on philosophy and psychology, Harvey considers how memory both wounds and sustains, and how it may be safely carried so as to create the life one wants.
Elegantly written, this is a powerful work about attention, language and the hard but fruitful labour of understanding. What We Remember, What We Forget asks: how should we retrieve our memories, and how can we trust what we find?
‘…memory is a creative endeavour: memory, the director’s cut; memory, a book of collected poems; memory, an exhibition of curated portraits; memory, a Surrealist retrospective.’
Siobhan Harvey
Siobhan Harvey is the author of nine books, including Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award–winning Cloudboy (OUP, 2014), the Ockham New Zealand Book Award–longlisted Ghosts (OUP, 2021), and, as co-editor, the bestselling Essential New Zealand Poems (Godwit, 2014). She won the 2023 Landfall Tauraka Essay Competition and has received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry, the NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship, the Kathleen Grattan Award, the Robert Burns Poetry Prize and the Write Well Award (US). Harvey is a senior lecturer in creative writing at AUT.
More About Siobhan Harvey
Cloudboy 
Ghosts