The third narrative involves the story of their daughter, Aila, an art critic and conceptual artist living in Berlin, and the marginalia she writes in her father's manuscript she discovers after his disappearance.

Alana’s takes the shape of a diary containing photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings, and meditations on Smithson’s oeuvre, with which she becomes increasingly obsessed.

Hugh’s is a more conventional third-person narrative, its voice numbed, disoriented, in the wake of his wife's unexpected death.

Opening it, the reader must choose what constitutes the privileged narrative, the one with which to begin, and that choice will exert pressure on the meaning she or he will make, since there are contradictory elements in the competing plots.

Theories of Forgetting, then, is interested in the materiality of page as well as in such thematic questions as death and the problem of memory and history.