Fact inside Fiction

Over the past few years, I've been teaching memoir writing both at Stanford and at the downtown campus of San Francisco State. In the course of that work, I've been confronted by the confusing nature of memory -- how arbitrary and subjective it can be. What is particularly striking is how different two people's memories of a shared experience can be.

For my Stanford course, we considered the relationship between memoir and journalism. In reporting, of course, we frequently interview sources and ask them to tell us what they remember about events, people, experiences. We write down their words, and quote them like gospel. Of course, we do our best to verify quotes by cross-checking with other sources and documents, but we rarely have the luxury to speculate whether our sources have accurate memories, even assuming they are trying to be truthful in the first place.

Memoir is even trickier. Here, we have only our own memory to work with. We may have journals, letters, photos, news clippings, and other contemporaneous historical material to rely on. But in most cases, when trying to recreate an event from the past, we have to somehow transport ourselves back in time, to recreate the honest emotional state of that moment if we are to have any hope to conveying what it was like to be there then.

As I've taught others how to access their memories and write their memoirs, I've increasingly found myself dogged by my own lifetime of memories. I find myself queestioning my own history -- or rather the history I've told myself up until now. Am I who I thought I was? How much is a life simply the sum of one's experiences? How is it that a sudden change, a loss, a trauma can shake up our memory stream so that it overruns its banks, and floods us with an overwhelming sense of no longer knowing what it is we thought we knew so well about ourselves?

Who exactly do we become then? How do we recover a past, the lines to which have somehow been broken? Does an entirely new story now have to be constructed?

To one who has entered this state of intellectual and emotional amnesia, there is a recurring fear: Will our past ever come home again ?