Memoirs and Memory

Zipping through San Francisco recently on a book tour, I met an old friend for dinner. We hadn't seen each other in decades, so this was the first time in a long time to take a trip together down memory lane.

The destination surprised me.

"Remember," he said, "that night when you had me over for dinner -- me and that food-writer friend of yours from the newspaper?" He was speaking of the early 1990s, the city of Detroit and the Detroit Free Press, the newspaper for which I worked from 1990 to 1995, before moving on to the New York Times.

"I had you over for dinner?" I asked. I seldom had anyone over for dinner. I was a timid host and an impatient, heedless, grudging cook.

"Yes," he said, "it was the first time I had hummus. And you made pasta, too. And you told me about the traveling you did right after college, when you retraced the route of some adventurer through Europe."

His point was that my account -- of a half-hearted effort at a modern-day pantomime of Aeneas's voyages -- had motivated him to take more frequent, grander trips of his own. But as he explained this, I was focused on something else: the curious and unsettling fact that I had no memory -- zero -- of ever having him and the other friend over for dinner. In fact I had no memory of him ever even being in my apartment.

And as our conversation progressed, it became clear that few of my and his memories of the old days overlapped. They were distinct, independent sets, not so much clashing as diverging. From whatever past we'd shared, he'd carried away one reel of scenes and me another.

The boon in memoirs over recent decades has prompted extensive discussion of the nature and veracity of memories. Which of these memories are imagined, even though the person remembering them deems them (or perhaps just markets them as) real? Which are exaggerated? And which have been so corrupted by the passage of time or the author's emotional investment in them that they have minimal merit, if any at all?

But what struck me when I circled back to friends and relatives to mine their recollections for help with my own memoir, Born Round, published last month, wasn't that the memories most vivid in my mind contradicted theirs. We didn't have warring details of the same events, nor did we have warring assessments of their import. If I and a friend or family member had held onto the same incident, we agreed for the most part on how it went down and what it meant.

What struck me, instead, was how selective our different memories were in terms of which incidents we'd held on to in the first place. And that strikes me still, as my Born Round-related interviews prompt old acquaintances to get in touch. They bring with them stories of our past interactions that are utterly unfamiliar to me: wholly new, wholly lost.

Sometimes, I can't remember the people themselves.

At a reading and question-and-answer session in Seattle last week, a woman approached me with an especially broad smile and particularly eager expression. She said her name, then added: "Remember me?"

I didn't.

She recounted the games of tag that she, I and other neighborhood kids had played in Madison, Conn., a waterfront town where, between the ages of 4 and 10, I spent many summer days visiting Grandma and Grandpa Bruni, who had a modest house there. It was in Madison, in fact, that the other kids my age first realized that my initials, F.B., could be turned into a gibe, a taunt -- that they could be said to stand not only for Frank Bruni but also for Fat Boy.

Was she one of those kids?

Her name and her description of which house in the tiny neighborhood, which I'd visited as recently as six weeks ago, triggered nothing. Absolutely nothing. But she was definitely for real: she talked about the way all of us neighborhood kids would pluck mussels from the crevasses of rocks in the Long Island Sound and bring them to Grandma Bruni, who could and would cook and eat as many of them as possible.

That was more than 35 years ago. (I'm 44 now.) But college: college was more recent, and until I wrote Born Round, I thought I remembered it comprehensively enough.

But then my friend Jeff and I got to talking. I referred a writer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni magazine to him; the writer was profiling me and wanted some comments from a classmate. I had Jeff's contact information nearby.

After he answered her questions, he emailed me, mentioning that he'd told her about the time, when he was editing the campus newspaper and I was one of his top lieutenants, that I'd crucially bailed him out of a jam by helping him write a difficult editorial in which he overruled the newspaper's editorial board and endorsed Walter Mondale, not Ronald Reagan, in the 1984 presidential election.

I have no memory whatsoever of that, even though the incident in question sounds -- I'm trusting him on this -- much, much more significant than what I do recall, including many of the pizzas we shared and much of the bad behavior in which we indulged. It's always the feasting and boozing that linger in my thoughts (and thus a lucky thing my memoir focuses on my relationship with food).

Time and again over this last year and a half, as I finished the book and then fielded relatives' and friends' reactions to it, I confronted the spottiness of memory, but not the spottiness I had expected to confront. What was missing and forgotten was less often crucial or even trivial details of events than the events themselves, gone in their entirety.

I remember, as if it were a movie clip I played just yesterday, the hospital room in which my mother died and the entire hour leading up to her death. But I couldn't remember a single theme or sentence from the eulogy I delivered until my older brother, Mark, sent me an electronic copy of it. I couldn't believe he'd kept one. I didn't, and have no memory why.

At one point I had to tell my younger brother, Harry, that I'd included, in Born Round, an incident when he said something hurtful to me, and that the scene, a turning point in my struggle to control my eating and weight, really couldn't be deleted. Gracious and generous, Harry didn't push back; instead, he apologized for having caused me any sadness. He also noted that he would have to take my word for the fact that he had indeed done so. An incident vividly emblazoned in my memory was utterly absent from his.

And so it went, with person after person and memory after memory, as I came to see that our memories aren't really patchy; they're patchworks, oddly and randomly retrieved bits and scraps that we weave together into something we believe to be a more integrated, seamless fabric than it really is.

After rummaging through my recollections, augmenting them with those belonging to others and condensing them into a life story, I don't worry that the scenes are significantly inaccurate or even remotely embellished.

I worry about what's not there and might have made for an even better story.

Or, for that matter, a different one. Do I -- do we -- remember only those scenes that fit neatly into the central narrative in which we're most invested, the one that dovetails most cleanly and neatly with the sense of self that we've chosen or that's been imposed on us by the people around us?

Do we in fact have other, equally interesting life stories that we're unaware of and unable to tell, simply because their building blocks are the memories that fell by the wayside?

Possibly. And while those memoirs might undermine the ones we've written, they also might just improve on them.

Frank Bruni, a longtime New York Times writer, was the newspaper's chief restaurant critic from mid-2004 until late August. His memoir, "Born Round: the Secret History of a Full-Time Eater," has just been published by Penguin Press.

 

 

Comments

[stfrisco]

In lots of posts on my memoir blog memoir-guide.comm), I discuss the selective and undependable nature of our memories. Rather than go back over old ground, I will simply refer to the entries in the categories "memory" and "memory and remembering," especially my essay of April 16, in which I describe standing in front of a group of people who have brought me there to be recognized as one of the founders of a nursery school I did not remember. My son, now 40 and a journalist in Venezuela, vividly remembers my coming to the school and showing the children how to make a birdhouse out of twigs. The whole idea of memory is a fascinating one, and I am constantly amazed by how individual our memories are.

Gene Bodzin

[judgeinmillvalley]

"... scenes that fit neatly into the central narrative in which we're most invested, the one that dovetails most cleanly and neatly with the sense of self that we've chosen or that's been imposed on us..."

The past is always changing--our view of it anyway--depending on what we want to do in the future. If we have invested in our past as indicating what a victim we are, we will select things that confirm that fact. We weave a narrative of ourselves in the world, looking at things in a way that will confirm it. Sometimes we remember hurtful remarks but forget all about what prompted them--what actions we took. If we want to make ourselves happy and to forge ahead, we'll tend to make lighter of those things that have hurt us, things that may not have happened.

In really painful attacks, shock protects our body and mind from remembering.

We can get ourselves to remember whatever we want, thus implanting those memories in outselves, thoroughly convinced that they "happened," while other objective means show that they didn't. It didn't take long to implant fictitious memories by suggestion in children. It's true for adults, as based on an experiment where people take a suggestion and elaborate, convincing themselves that it happened..

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-bruni/memoirs-and-memory_b_288484.html

[laurahfc]

You ask, "Do we in fact have other, equally interesting life stories that we're unaware of?" The answer is yes. My sister tells fascinating stories in which I am a leading player but also a listener who hears as for the first time. Sometimes these stories do end up sparking memories, but not always.

The same is true for people: I was going through an '80s datebook recently and didn't recognize many of the names. People I had long-term friendships (acquainta­nceships?) have been wiped off my hard drive. Some have even Facebook friended me, thus proving that memory loss is not always a two-way street.

[Deanna Runeman]

CRAZY...my friend and I were just talking about this exact thing about a week ago.

We both had our 20th HS Reunions this past summer, talking with people who "knew us when" was eye-opening to say the least. What discovery was most intriguing was the realization that at the very moments that we felt most embarassed­/vulnerabl­e/ass*nine we were indulging our self serving and self centeredness. Anothers perspective finds the same incident or memory loaded with their own heavy set of feeling and circumstances that had, for the most part, nothing to do with us at all. And to imagine we had been flogging ourselves for years with narrow recollections perceived only by us.

[potrerohillman]

how rashomon. this is seems to be a well known phenomenon. actually jury instructions often admonish that people perceive and remember things differently. no two people view the same event the same way so how could the memories be anything but different?

[JScott]

Welcome to middle age......i­t starts to fade as you get older, and what you did write a book will help.
I advise younger folk write down what you can remember because you slowly forget it as you get older and it will get harder and sketchier to recall....­and folks that were part of it to help recall may pass away....I'­m finding this happening.­...I don't think it has anything to do with a precursor to alzheimers tho.

[potrerohillman]

perhaps, it is not about memory, but rather what is remembered.

early in my life, i realized that my version of events was not necessarily what others remembered. when i was a young person about town, and had a much better memory, people would tell me stories of which i had no clear recollection and sometimes no recollection at all.

i think it is difficult to assess the impact we each have on each other. the slightest gesture or casual remark may leave a lasting impression. it is as if we are actors who may not remember a specific performance but for the members of the audience it may be a life long memory.

[bekhuff]

Though I am sure it happens more frequently with age, age hardly has anything to do with it. When I was a teenager, I would not remember friends' names or faces a year later, if I hadn't had contact with them. At various times in my life, this has occurred. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with age or health, but rather with investment. I knew a lot of people (I grew up in downtown Toronto), but as much as I might have enjoyed their company at times, I didn't see them as central to my life, and so they went right out of my head. Authors I admired, or the bartender at our favorite pub... those names and faces lasted much longer.

Now the authors' names are fading, lol.

[Cheapthrills]

OMG..huff post forgot to make the heading: "Spiritual memoirs and spiritual memories" Isn't that the ongoing trend in the Living section...­make everything "spiritual­"...

[wmsanders]

dera mr. bruni -

i just finished your book yesterday. "i couldn't put it down" sounds like a cliche but true! my partner suggested we buy it as i have a weight issue. a big one. my life's journey with food and insecurity was very much, near identical, to your's, i feel that your memoir will do more for me than all the 53 diet books and weightwatc­hersnutris­ystemjenni­ecraig3hou­rdietstill­manatkinsc­ambridge diets combined.

i'll let you know when i've lost my 70+ pounds. thanks. oh, and thanks for this post as well. my friends are amazed at what i remember and i at what they don't.

sincerely,
bill

[bnyb]

"weightwat­c­hersnutr­is­ystemje­nni­ecraig­3hou­rdiet­still­mana­tkinsc­amb­ridge diets"


I'm sure we must have bumped into each other a hundred times :)

[Kelly Abbott]

I created Dandelife.com in order to help ordinary people not only tell their life stories but also enlist others to help them remember. It's been around for 3+ years and, I'm proud to say, is a thriving community of individuals, their friends, family and fans. For anyone - not just writers - it's a great place to record and remember.

[mckinley]

Kelly,

My server could not find Dandelife.com

Misspelled?

[theophagousmonkey]

Theo thinks that this is an intriguing post. Theo thinks further that as we learn more about consciousness - that perhaps the apparent coherence of consciousness itself is an illusion - we learn more about memory and memories and their inherent fallibility and plasticity. Theo wonders how many innocent people are sitting in American prisons - some of the worst prisons in the developed world - and waiting on death row as a result of faulty memories reinforced by emotional urgency.

Cheers,

Theo

[gotsmarter]

I'm glad I happened upon this article while clicking around Huffington Post. The ideas and thoughts it inspired have become part of my fabric--I think.

[meJo]

Thank you. It used to bother me when family and friends would recount incidents that I just could not remember. It's good to know many people experience the same thing.

[lastpost]

“scraps that we weave together into something we believe to be a more integrated, seamless fabric than it really is.”

Welcome to the realization, that ours is a personalized rendition of reality, rather than actual reality itself. Internally reconstructed from decoded input data, evaluated against stored experience.
e.g.
Have you ever returned to somewhere you knew well as a child, and discovered that everything is strangely small? Comparing a 3 foot “reality”, with a current 6 foot “reality”?

[Boysmom]

Terrific article. Each of us remembers the past for the things that mattered most to us. I had an excellent example of this some years back when my then husband and I went on vacation in Greece. We made reservations for the first night and the last night and left everything in-between to whim. We left no itinerary with family or business so were not bothered by phone calls or emails. We were free spirits.

It was wonderful and we enjoyed each & every second. Each night we both recorded our memories of the day in small journals and then we shared our thoughts. It was astonishing: we each recorded different things. All were accurate, and taken as a whole, we had the entire day covered. It was amazing to me that we could travel the same landscape, meet the same people, eat the same food and yet the details we remembered were different.

I'm from a family of five siblings and frequently my memories are discounted as fabrications. I just smile and don't try to convince; I know that all five of us had completely different experiences, hence different memories. My memories are valid whether or not they are remembered by others in the family.

[NevaforLeadership]

Fantastic article!

My experiences exactly, with my family.