Book Review: If I Could Remember by Donna Costa

Reviewed by Melissa Suggitt

A daughter’s grief, a mother’s fading memory, and a chorus of teddy bears that refuse to let the silence win – If I Could Remember is as heartbreaking as it is unexpectedly tender.

Donna Costa’s If I Could Remember is the kind of memoir that doesn’t just open a window into one family’s struggle with Alzheimer’s—it rips the curtains down, lets the cold air in, and forces you to sit in it. It is at once brutal and tender, blending memoir, fable, and medical fact into a tapestry that feels both unflinchingly real and strangely magical.

The book begins with diagnosis, a moment rendered with the rawness of a battlefield. Costa’s mother sits in a sterile room, subjected to the indignities of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. When told she can no longer drive, her grief is immediate, visceral: “Please, please, don’t take my license! Not that!” The plea isn’t about a car; it’s about independence, dignity, and the right to exist on one’s own terms. In passages like these, Costa captures how loss arrives in increments, each one as devastating as the last.

But this isn’t just a medical memoir. It’s also a book where teddy bears come alive, carrying the weight of metaphor and memory. Her mother, a prolific bear-maker, left behind hundreds of handmade teddies, each stitched with care. In Costa’s hands, they become companions and narrators, voices in the dark when the human ones falter. They bicker, console, and even confront Alzheimer’s themselves. In one whimsical yet piercing exchange, when a bear struggles to recall the past, another responds simply: “If I could remember, I would.” That refrain becomes the book’s heartbeat. Childlike in its phrasing, but devastating in what it suggests about memory’s fragility.

Woven among these intimate vignettes are passages of research and cultural reflection. Costa details the science of neurons and tangles, the statistics of diagnosis, and the stigma faced by both patients and caregivers. Yet she balances the clinical with the lyrical, moving seamlessly from “amyloid plaques” to a story of her Polish grandmother bootlegging whiskey with bottles strapped to her legs. The juxtaposition works because Costa understands that identity—personal, familial, cultural—is never just one thing.

The writing itself is sharp-edged but warm. Costa does not smooth over the humiliation, the anger, or the expletives that slip from her mother’s lips in moments of fury. She honors those moments not to shock but to show the truth of decline, dignity tangled with rage, lucidity with confusion.

Readers are steeped in both heartbreak and resilience. We sit at the kitchen table when her mother forgets to set a place for her daughter. We meet Charlie and Harry, teddy bears whose friendship is tested by memory loss. We feel the cultural dissonance of heritage half-claimed, half-denied. Costa doesn’t give us a linear arc so much as a kaleidoscope of fragments, reflecting the way memory itself splinters.

If I Could Remember is ultimately about how we hold onto love when memory fails us. It is about daughters carrying their mothers, bears carrying their makers, and words carrying what can no longer be spoken. To read it is to be both gutted and comforted, to laugh through tears, and to feel deep in your bones the urgency of remembering while we still can.

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