SOURCE: “Digging up Mummy,” in Spectator, June 26, 1999, p. 34.

In the following negative review, Brookner describes Forster's The Memory Box as disappointing and formulaic.

Most women would claim to be experts on their own mothers, but not perhaps on their mothers' prehistory, unless those mothers were unreservedly expansive. Catherine, the heroine and narrator of Margaret Forster's novel The Memory Box, is not in that position, since her mother, Susannah, died at the age of 31, leaving the six-month-old Catherine to be cared for by others. Those others were circumspect and benign, in particular her father's second wife, Charlotte, whom Catherine would have said she preferred: no child would be glad to be associated with a death, however pathetic and regrettable that death was said to have been by those so benign elders—grandmother, father, second wife—who saw to it that she should not suffer. So successful were they, and...