‘The Perpetual Now’ Explores

Lonni Sue Johnson’s Dilemma

COOPERSTOWN – Michael D. Lemonick, now an editor at Scientific American, has just published “The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory and Love,” chronicling the overnight memory loss of Lonni Sue Johnson, the Town of Middlefield artist who created many New Yorker covers and drawing in the New York Times.

CLICK TO READ KIRKUS REVIEW

“Lemonick focuses on her case and biography,” recounts the first review, in Kirkus Reviews, “but he has larger goals: to acquaint us with the history of research on memory, to review some of the most notable cases in memory loss, and to help us comprehend current theories about types of memory – and how memory works.”

In 2013, Lemonick wrote a piece about the case in Time Magazine, and it has been explored in The New Yorker, the Washington Post and other major publications.

At the time she was stricken, Lonni Sue, a pilor, was writing and illustrating a column, “Aerial Perspective,” in The Freeman’s Journal.