Greetings, writers—
Don’t forget to sign up for the *free generative writing class* next Monday, February 27th at 7:00 p.m. PDT by replying “YES” to this newsletter. It’ll go straight to my email, from which I will send you the Zoom link.
Well, it’s another snow day in Portland, which is very exciting for polar bears at the Oregon Zoo and kids who aren’t stuck on a school bus for six hours. Yesterday a friend from Brooklyn texted me to fact-check the snowfall because he couldn’t believe we were into the double-digits, and my dad wrote to ask if I remembered the blizzard of 1978, when we lived in New Hampshire and “had huge piles of snow at end of driveway at our Penacook Road house.”
I didn’t, but I pretended that I did (pretended to both of us, I mean), because I really, really wanted to remember.
Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t kept a journal off and on for the last two-and-a-half decades I wouldn’t know what happened from 1997 to, I don’t know, last week. Meanwhile I’m helping an 84-year-old accountant write his life story, and the other day he described in great detail the bus routes he took from Lovelock, Nevada, to Bismarck, North Dakota in the year 1965. Why? Not because it matters to posterity—or even to him—but because he can. And then I wonder why he can recall such minutiae when it seems as if I only have about twenty vague memories of my mother, who died in 1991 and who was my favorite person in this great wide world.
That memory, like any other gift, is allotted unevenly will be news to no one. But I do wonder: are those days we can’t recall lost to us forever? Or might we remember them in some future time if we try hard enough?
Here’s something I just remembered: When I sold my first book on proposal eighteen years ago, the editor thought he was buying a memoir. But when I started writing it, I realized I didn’t remember the people or events in question clearly enough. I didn’t want to get things wrong—nor did I want to interview everyone involved—so I turned the book into a semi-autobiographical novel. Of course now certain parties think some of the things I made up are true, but that’s okay.
The Swiss novelist Bernard Comment says that for him, writing is a “stubborn regaining of the past.” A.S. Byatt wrote that powerful childhood memories basically tormented her until she became a writer, “because only the act of writing gave them a glimmer of the importance they had in life, and thus gave them a place, a form and an order which made sense of them.” For Toni Morrison, the act of remembering “is a form of willed creation…not an effort to find out the way it really was—that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”
What is your relationship between your memories and your writing? Or even others’ memories and your writing?
Writing either as yourself or as one of your characters, consider one of the following questions:
What do you wish you remember but can’t? What do you wish you could forget?
Try to build a scene that dramatizes the answer. It doesn’t have to be profound—a character might wish she could remember where she put her car keys—but of course it could be.
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. Sign up for Monday! Seriously! You can do it via this button, too.
Great post. Memory, shifting sands, indeed. Thank you for Toni Morrison's paper. Do not doubt of your usefulness on this earth: your thoughts, your prompts, your readings, your thoughts on your readings are invaluable. Thank you.
Thanks Emily! I love this post. Memory is such an intriguing and complicated part of all of our lives, as is our relationship with it. I've long believed I have a memory like a steel trap, but often when I'm with some of my oldest friends (from high school or college or my twenties) and we recall something that happened years (decades) ago, someone will tell a story to which my response is a bewildered, "She did? We were? I was?" Likewise, I can retell a different story to which they have a similar response, but collectively we can cobble together most of what we think happened. I have one friend who claims to recall practically nothing from the time we both lived in Athens, GA, but remembers that one of my housemates worked in a chicken processing plant, which I have zero memory of.
Yesterday I finished Dani Shapiro's extraordinary novel, "Signal Fires," which I can't say enough wonderful things about, including that I wept after reading the final sentence. (I love everything she has written.) In it memory is such a profound element that it almost serves as an individual character, in addition to the memories of the actual characters, including the fractured ones of a woman with Alzheimer's. I highly recommend!