The Thing About Memory

Memory, its effectiveness and pitfalls, has been in the national news cycle these past weeks. The reliability of recall has been called into doubt in a very public manner. A victim’s perspective was pitted against the experience and viewpoint of the accused. At question were the holes in the victim’s recollection and those memory lapses damaged the witness’s credibility.  In the end, corroborating testimony for the accuser could not be verified so the accused was exonerated. In this true life scenario memory was proven to be unpredictable, unreliable, and frustrating. Yet memory had been shown to have a surprising hold on some details. It had shown staying power, and what it held true could not be easily dismissed.

Think about this. How is it that we can remember what we were wearing, where we were sitting, and who was in the room with us when the Twin Towers went down?  Why is it that the person you shared that experience with remembers that he’d just poured you a cup of coffee while you thought you had a bottle of water in your hand?  What accounts for the differences in what we recall?

Memory seems to be selective and fickle. We rely on our memory, trust it and are often convinced of its accuracy, but often our memory is insufficient and called in doubt.  We need memory to reconstruct the details of life, but we cannot rely on it solely. All this got me thinking about memory as it relates to writing, specifically the crafting of memoir.

In writing my memoir about the eight years I spent digging into my closed adoption, I kept a journal (see my blog 10/10 “Why It’s Important to Keep a Journal”).  That log helped me reconstruct an accurate timeline of the places, people and events vital to developing my story.  Without it I would have had to trust my own selective memory. Yes, I could draw on my sister’s recollections, and dig through my files for other corroborating research.  I did in fact use all those things to get at the touch points of my tale, but the journal was my number one resource. My memory wasn’t in doubt per se but to tell my tale, I knew it offered only a limited perspective.  To write an accurate account of my story, I wanted to augment what I remembered by using a wider lens.

In capturing several of the key scenes significant to my memoir, my journal entries were vague.  The dates were accurate, the people were identifiable, and the location was noted but the scene was just a skeleton.  It lacked the contours that would bring the scene to life for a reader. Sensory details were necessary. To get at these, I needed to make my memory work harder.  I had at my disposal photos stored in my computer and a sort of card catalogue that I’d constructed from the pictures and notes I’d been saving from my birth mother.  My bio-mom had dated all her correspondence and written descriptions on the back of the photos. This card catalogue is a writer’s dream. The material boosts my memory to a different level.

Like the accuser/victim recently in the news, there was one particular scene where my memory just wouldn’t budge; it had shut down and my journal and the card catalogue were also noticeably lacking.  I took a walk. Nothing emerged from the exercise and change of scenery. I gave it a few days. Still nothing. I wrote other things, vowing to come back to that difficult scene. Weeks went by. My memory was as stubborn as a two year old who wouldn’t go down for a nap.  Exercise, diversions, and time hadn’t induced a breakthrough. I was beyond frustrated with myself. What’s more, scolding my psyche had induced a minor writer’s block on other fronts.

I went to my piano. Tinkling the ivories before dinner cues my mind and body that it’s time to ramp down. Music is a treat.  It is like sour cream on a baked potato. You can get by without it, but oh it changes the flavor of life. I paged through my instruction books for a piece that fit my mood. The melodies floated like a ticker tape through my head.  As I played the opening notes from a favorite sonata, something clicked in my head. You guessed it. That tune was instrumental in bringing forth all the right words I needed to get the troubled scene flowing.

Memory has its own buttons to press, its own code to unlock, its own particular set of keys.  What unlocks my memory will differ from the tools you will might need to invoke to jostle your recall. Perhaps you will need a particular aroma to trigger a recollection, or maybe it will be the way the light hits the hardwood floors, or the sight of a little girl’s red sweater that will add weight to your remembering.  If you’re patient, the details might become available to you, or they might not. That’s one of the peculiarities of memory. It is selective and it’s stubborn.

The main thing about memory is that it’s personal.  Your recall of an event is only one perspective of an experience. It will differ from that of someone else experiencing the same event at the same time, like the 911 scenarios and the accused-accuser situation highlighted earlier. Often recall needs a nudge, and journals, photos, music, food, or exercise can prove useful.

Sometimes recall is just luck. Sometimes it is hard work. Sometimes what it reveals is dicey, shocking, enlightening and troubling. Sometimes memory just wants to be left alone.