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Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. What do you think about this?
Let me know.
Looking Back
On my mind? Sometimes I think this piece should be called "Losing My Mind." If you took all the things I remember and threw them on one side of a balance scale and all the things I've forgotten and threw them on the other side, I know which side would weigh more. Way more. What have I forgotten recently: the password to my library account, which cluster my son is in at middle school, where I put the spare shower curtain I bought when there was a great sale on shower curtains, the title of a book I read last week—the list goes on and on.
But thoughts about forgetting are filling my head more than usual because I've been reading so many terrific memoirs lately. Books like The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Comfort: A Journey Through Grief by Ann Hood and Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. (A theme here? Yes, they're all about grief and death. I was plunging into those dark waters as I wrote my own fictional story of grief, the young adult novel Lost.) While there was much in these books to cause me to sit up straight and say, "Wow," one thing my brain kept circling around was, "How do they remember all these details?" Joan Didion chronicles what she was reading, what she was wearing, the food on the table, the drink in her hand, who said what followed by the precise response—every detail as if she has a photo-recording of every event from every angle.
Honestly, ask me to write a true and honest and comprehensive account of yesterday, and I'm at a complete loss. Last week? Last year? Twenty years ago? Fuggedaboudit. (Literally.)
Aha! This is why I write fiction. I can journey back to myself as I was forty years ago, remember with crystal clarity how I felt at a particular moment—and then just make up all the details surrounding the event. The color of my shoes? They were red patent leathers! The way I wore my hair? Two braids tied with limp ribbons! The corner I was standing on? The intersection of Maplewood and Vine! Is any of this true? Who cares? I'm writing fiction. Blissfully writing fiction.
I take my authorial hat off to memoirists. They have functioning memories I would buy in a second (if I could remember where I put my checkbook). For those of us not so well endowed, though, thank goodness there's still a living to be made in making up stories.
How good is your memory? Let me know.
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