Memory is Slippery
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I was planning on posting a piece about a music concert this time, but I got distracted by a certain celebrity memoir that was hard to miss in the news recently. Having written a couple of books that fall into the memoir category, I got to thinking about my experiences with writing around sensitive family issues.
“Memory is slippery” is the first sentence in my first book, The House With the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers, published in the spring of 2011, two weeks after my mother died. Soon afterwards, I started working on my second book, A Year of Days, which grew out of the eulogy I wrote for my mother’s funeral. She had struggled with dementia for the last years of her life, and her older sister had succumbed to Alzheimers a number of years earlier. Thus, the topic of remembering and memory is often on my mind.
This photo is me in 2011, about six months after my first book was released. I like taking photo breaks away from my writing desk to play with my camera and I was taking selfies long before selfies were a thing. Sometimes I think of selfies as mini-memoirs. I still have that fuzzy blue top and it still keeps me warm on a cool day, but the rest of what was going on for me that blurry day is gone from my memory. It was an ordinary moment on an ordinary day, not a moment that would factor into a story.
“Memory is slippery.” I wrote those words back around 2010. I still like that simple little sentence a lot. In the almost twelve years that have elapsed since my first book was published, I have become very aware that stories also evolve, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a heartbeat. The story in my first book changed between the time I approved the final proofs and the day of its launch several months later. Subsequent events and new information had shifted my perspective in that short period, but nothing could be done about what was in the book at that point. The book came out, people read it, and people are still reading it.
As the tenth anniversary of its publication approached in 2021, I decided to read it again. With some apprehension, I pulled my copy from the bookshelf. It still had the colourful tabs I’d placed in it to mark the passages I liked to read aloud at literary events.
I sat down and went to the first page, prepared to wince at what and how I wrote back then. Surprisingly, I discovered that overall I wouldn’t change much. I’d fix the typo I hate, tighten some awkward sentences, and delete some unnecessary adverbs. But I wouldn’t mess with the rest. The writer I was then told her story and told it well. Many people who had been personally affected by the cruelty of the twentieth century’s closed adoption system contacted me after reading it and thanked me for writing it. I’m proud of that book and glad it exists (out of print now, but still available in ebook formats).
The thing about a memoir is that the book comes to an end, but the life continues on (hopefully). The lived story changes and grows, while the published story is but a chapter, static and frozen. It’s not the whole story and never was. Memoir writers can rarely bring themselves to write the whole story. There are often elements they simply cannot include: the betrayal would be too great, the consequences too harsh. That’s why many writers don’t choose memoir as their genre. Instead, they reshape and reimagine events and people from their personal stories as fiction. Readers tend to think of novels as “made-up stories” but there’s a lot of truth in fiction.
Many readers like memoirs because they are “true” stories. But truth is as slippery as memory, and easily distorted. Right now I’m reading Remember by Lisa Genova, author of the novel Still Alice. Remember is nonfiction, a readable exploration of how we preserve our yesterdays. Genova talks about what she calls episodic memories. They are the ones we write about, the vivid ones that imprint themselves on our minds because of their “flashbulb” moments (weddings, funerals, births, historic events, a fight with your brother). Flashbulb moments are the stories we re-visit so often that the original moment is gone, replaced by the crafted memory. Genova says that memory is always wrong. I understand what she’s saying, although I wouldn’t use that word. Instead of wrong, I’d say a memory is estranged from the original event: it has slipped away, morphed into something else. We treasure, and at times obsess over, our flashbulb moments. When we revisit one of them, we examine it, shape it, mine it for meaning. And every time we do that, whether we’re aware of it or not, we make tiny additions, wee deletions, or slight distortions. Lapses and embellishments are inherent to human storytelling.
The morphed memories of everyone involved in a “flashbulb” moment are rarely the same. That’s why memoir writers need to be prepared for the possibility of family fallout. The people who are in the published story may not like how they’re represented. If they don’t, they’ll likely disagree with the writer’s version of the events and react negatively. The people who are most likely to react negatively are the ones who lived the story along with the writer, like siblings. Their negative reactions can make life after publishing a memoir difficult.
Obviously, once a book is out there, there’s no taking it back. The writer has to deal with its aftermath, both public and private. How writers feel about their memoirs after they publish them often depends on what their motives were at the time of writing. Exploring the social and historical contexts of lived experience, sharing a unique story from an informed perspective, and exposing the flaws in outdated cultural institutions are positive motives. Placing blame and lashing out are not. That’s where time helps. Time broadens perspective, allows inflamed emotions to settle, gives reconciliation a chance, offers the possibility of progress. Allowing decades to pass, not merely a few years, can greatly enhance a memoir project.
Memoir is an important genre because telling stories is what we humans do to connect with each other. Personal stories are essential for our social and cultural wellbeing, but how and why we tell them matters a lot.
Thank you for reading Me Who Writes. Geo and I are packing for a trip. My next newsletter will be from a different continent. Stay tuned.
Memory is fictitious.