The Housekeeper and the Professor

During my schooling years, mathematics was my forte, though I hardly found it interesting. When I read the book, I felt that my pride was dwarfed by the beautiful writing on mathematics, about which I realized I had known almost nothing.

The writing endowed mathematics with a life full of various feelings, and enabled it to become ties of love, friendship, care, etc. which, in turn, changed people’s life for better. In a way, the book reshaped my view of the world.

I am fascinated with “made families,” those connections of strangers who pass into such intimate friendships that they become de facto, chosen families.

While the core premise of The Housekeeper and the Professor will seize your imagination—the “professor” has suffered a traumatic brain injury that leaves him with only 8 minutes of short-term memory—it is the beauty of the friendship that emerges between him, the “housekeeper” hired to care for him, and her ten-year-old son that will stay with you.

In the present-tense living of having to reintroduce themselves anew to this math genius every morning, all the characters learn… show more.

This is the tender and intriguing story of a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. The other main character is a young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. Each day, the characters are reintroduced to one another, while the Professor’s long-term memories open up new directions for them all, creating close bonds and a strange familiar unit. It’s a simple story but it has remained with me for some reason – perhaps because memory is so key to… show more.