Facts Inside Fiction (Questions About Memory)

(I first published a version of this essay on my personal blog in April 2006.)

Over recent 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. 

Of course, we do our best to verify quotes by cross-checking with other sources and documents, but we don’t have reliable ways of determining whether our sources have accurate memories, and for the most part we have to assume they are trying to be truthful.

Writing a personal memoir is even trickier. Here, we often 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 it all starts with our memory. 

And in most cases, when trying to recreate an event from the past, we have to somehow transport ourselves back in time, to recreate the emotional state of that distant moment if we are to have any hope to conveying what it was like to actually be there then.

As I've worked with students to access their memories in these memoir classes, I've increasingly found myself dogged by my own doubts about my memories. I find myself questioning 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?

What about when you discover you were mistaken about something?

How do we recover a past, the lines to which have somehow been blurred? Does an entirely new story now have to be constructed?

To one who has entered this state of intellectual and emotional ambiguity, there is a recurring fear: Will our past come back? What story do we tell ourselves now?

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