The Memory of Water is a comedy written by English playwright Shelagh Stephenson, first staged at Hampstead Theatre in 1996.

Her life revolves around creating a memory of him, which she divests into a coma patient suffering from amnesia in which she is treating (imagining that he is Patrick) and if she can wake him she can awaken her own son from their estrangement.

Teresa she is the eldest sister and an unhappy housewife, who runs a health food supplement store with her husband Frank, and who feels she has had to keep the family together for years.

She met her husband by whittling down responses she received to a singles advert, believing this to be the best way of finding her future partner, but both she and Frank discovered that they were not as they had described themselves.

Her sisters remain dismissive of her current romantic attachment, as Catherine changes her lovers regularly, (it is indicated that this is not necessarily her own choice) and is fairly self-obsessed.

She enters loaded with shopping bags, and appears to have a limited attention span as her topics of conversation change with alacrity.

The sisters drift around their own islands of memory, unable to agree on one particular point, and yet are unified by their familial bond (Vi comments that "some things stay in your bones").

The play was adapted by Stephenson for the 2002 film, Before You Go, directed by Lewis Gilbert, starring, Julie Walters, John Hannah, and Joanne Whalley.