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This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[I copy and pasted this answer from another member. Think it explains it the best!

I had wondered about this too. Here's my take on this:

I recalled Barry's first experience with FMS and having two sets of memories. He's just met with the Behrmans who had turned him away and he's halfway through eating huevos rancheros in a diner in Montauk before boarding a train back to the city. He knows he's being tailed by someone who is later revealed to be Vince, just as another set of memories rolls in, in which he never encounters Ann Voss Peters on the roof of the Poe Building, then looks up the police report of the attempted suicide of Franny Behrman or travels to meet Joe and Franny in Montauk and he's at his apartment in Washington Heights where he's watching a Knicks game instead of eating at a diner in Montauk. He has two different recollections of his past few days leading up until a few minutes prior to arrival of the alternate memories and he fears he has FMS.

Now when Ann Voss Peters recounts her life as Ann Behrman to Barry on Nov 2nd, 2018, she says she gained her memories of that life a month prior, i.e. October 2018 and in that life, Joe's first wife Franny had killed herself by throwing herself off the Poe Building 15 years prior.

If I'm infering correctly, in the original timeline, Joe's wife Franny committed suicide sometime in 2003 and he eventually meets and starts a life with Ann in Vermont where they run a landscaping business together and have a son named Sam. Although they're happy, Joe never gets over his guilt of being unable to help Franny and losing her. So when he finds a chance for a 'do-over' with Slade's chair, sometime in October 2018, he has Slade send him back in his memory to 2003 to save Franny.

Barry gains his memories of never meeting Ann and Joe Behrman on November 5, 2018 at the diner in Montauk. Helena and Slade on two separate occasions tell Barry that Slade killed her on the night of November 5, 2018. Which leads me to believe the memories of never meeting Ann and Joe Behrman that Barry gains in the Montauk Diner are Barry's memories of the original timeline, in which he might have also remembered a world that was unaffected by FMS. So in the end, Barry attempts and succeeds in traveling to a dead memory, a recollection we read about early in the book and stops Slade from killing Helena, thereby resetting all timelines.

Ask me more if you have further questions and I'll try my best to explain as I understand it. (hide spoiler)]

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Luda

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Tony

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Arvind Good question. That is not the original timeline. I have a visual of all the timelines here that helps answer this and other questions about the book.
https://www.starvind.com/bookreviews/...
Hope it helps.

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This question contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[How can it be the original timeline the one in which Barry has brunch with Julia if that was the day Ann Voss Peters kills herself because of FMS?? In that timeline FMS was already a thing and the chair had been used... (hide spoiler)]

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