This is, ultimately, a powerful spin on a classic science fictional concept: to what extent do our memories make us who we are? Where does the line between identity and memories fall? ... Using precise and evocative language, Morrow turns a powerful concept into a sharp exploration of where memory, identity, and the body meet—and what the implications of that might be.

Mem, a world where it’s possible to extract a memory from a person and use it to create a living, breathing human copy. Most of these copies can act out only the memory from which they were born, but not Dolores Extract No. 1. This Mem, who calls herself Elsie, is the only Mem in history to become sentient ... The story unfolds as Elsie learns more about herself and the original Dolores. More important, Elsie holds up a mirror to her human counterparts, and the reader as well.

When Canadian professor Dr. Toutant discovers how to remove memories and contain them in identical humanoid vessels called Mems, the rich flock to Montreal for extractions. But society debutante Dolores’s first Mem exhibits unique traits. Instead of being trapped in her spawning memory, this Mem’s awareness grows and expands, while other Mems expire once the emotion of their spawning memories plays out. For this singular Mem, eighteen years have passed, and she’s still trying to figure out what makes her different before it’s too late ... Morrow delivers a new classic in her exploration of identity, memory, and human property, proving that, like experience itself, memory is slippery, unpredictable, and rarely what it seems. For those rich enough to capitalize on it, this new science yields unexpected results, but none is more unintended than Dolores Extract No. 1 herself.

In its opening pages a woman walks into a vault and explains to the receptionist...that she is a Mem, a living human figure that walks, talks, breathes, and eats, but was created nearly twenty years earlier through a scientific process of memory extraction. It’s the end of the 1920s in Montreal as the novel begins, but in this alternate version of that era, the wealthy are able to have their unpleasant memories extracted and stored in a vault so they do not have to wrestle with pain or sorrow ... Over the years that this service has been available, however, weaknesses in the process have appeared. People who have too many memories extracted gradually lose their minds in a process akin to dementia ... In the middle of all this is Elsie, the narrator of MEM, and a unique specimen. She is the only Mem ever extracted who has a mind and a will of her own ... Due to the wishes of Elsie’s Source, she is in danger of erasure, in a way that I never quite found convincing; the idea that such a unique specimen from a newish scientific procedure would ever be subjected to danger, rather than study, seemed unlikely to me. Of course, the author is building an allegory, and a worthwhile one ... Nevertheless, I rank MEM as a new classic, a work of careful craftsmanship.

Dolores Extract No. 1 is a fresh-faced, inquisitive 19-year-old. Early in the novel, she reveals that her self-given name is Elsie, after a character in the 1922 silent film The Toll of the Sea. In many ways, Elsie fits the character type of the 'shopgirl' common in fiction of her era. She's an individuating young woman absorbing what the city has to offer — clothes, movies, a flat to call her own ... What sometimes feels like a relentless onslaught of exposition becomes more tolerable as Elsie's character is fleshed out as someone who constantly finds new understanding. Aware of herself and the societal limitations that threaten her freedom, she becomes a scientist of both herself and Memhood at large. This evolution echoes the decolonizing impulse of auto-ethnography ... MEM offers a powerful argument that what makes us human is not just our memories — for better and for worse — but also our powers of self-determination.

Mem is a exploration of memory, identity, and mortality set in a vaguely sinister alternate-reality Montreal circa 1925. In this rendering, scientists have discovered a peculiar method of extracting memories from people and delivering them into 'Mems,' half-alive creatures whose purpose is to experience the memory over and over again in a fortress called the Vault until they die. But not our narrator, oddly enough. The story is told by a 19-year-old Mem who identifies as 'Elsie,' though her true designation is 'Dolores Extract No. 1,' meant to keep the memory of a car crash in 1906 from troubling her 'source,' ... With her dizzying concept ... Morrow offers an epiphany for readers of speculative fiction with echoes of ideas explored in films like Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

...Mem's are physical beings that are part of a groundbreaking procedure developed to extract memories from humans. Mems store the traumatic or cherished memories that humans would like either to get rid of or preserve. Incapable of autonomous thought, Mems regurgitate an infinite loop of whatever memory they have absorbed until expiration, sometimes with horrifying results—except, somehow, Elsie, who has lived independently for 18 years ... There is a flat romantic subplot involving scientist Harvey Parrish, and the revelation of Elsie’s existence might have been better left to the imagination ... But the novel is at its best when it presents Elsie at her most human, forcing the real ones around her to reckon with what her personhood means for theirs.