I've been remembering my great aunts and uncle recently. I remember certain things but what I realise is how little I know of their lives, and this leads inevitably to how I wish I had asked why they were vegetarians, why my uncle was a conscientious objector, why they lived in a Quaker village... If I turn their lives into fiction then I can make it up...
Memories play strange narrative tricks. I recently wrote about my family's wartime experience, and was relying on my memory of conversations had over thirty years ago with long dead relatives. It seems likely that at least some of the story I ended up conveying what mental fabrication, doubly unreliable through the fallibility of the memories of my relatives and of my own. Ultimately though, I felt this didn't matter, because the story conveyed a certain truth beyond the minutiae of the unreliable details.
What you say here is scary to me. I grew up believing in a fundamental, unchanging self. But of course it makes sense that we change, our memories change, our emotions at any given time color how we think of the past and the present. I've been writing memoir for 7 years now (after evidence-based academic writing) and I find myself including doubt or questions or challenges to memories as I write. It can enrich the narrative, if done thoughtfully!
I've been remembering my great aunts and uncle recently. I remember certain things but what I realise is how little I know of their lives, and this leads inevitably to how I wish I had asked why they were vegetarians, why my uncle was a conscientious objector, why they lived in a Quaker village... If I turn their lives into fiction then I can make it up...
Memories play strange narrative tricks. I recently wrote about my family's wartime experience, and was relying on my memory of conversations had over thirty years ago with long dead relatives. It seems likely that at least some of the story I ended up conveying what mental fabrication, doubly unreliable through the fallibility of the memories of my relatives and of my own. Ultimately though, I felt this didn't matter, because the story conveyed a certain truth beyond the minutiae of the unreliable details.
What you say here is scary to me. I grew up believing in a fundamental, unchanging self. But of course it makes sense that we change, our memories change, our emotions at any given time color how we think of the past and the present. I've been writing memoir for 7 years now (after evidence-based academic writing) and I find myself including doubt or questions or challenges to memories as I write. It can enrich the narrative, if done thoughtfully!