Your Fondest Childhood Memory May Not Have Happened

Here’s a weird thought: There’s a good chance that at least a few of your childhood “memories” never actually happened. You might think you remember your 3rd birthday party when what you really remember are the pictures, or you might believe you have a very vivid memory from elementary school that in reality happened to your brother.

Or, you might even be lifting your memories from the books and movies you loved as a child. Recently, the writer Elizabeth McCracken realized that’s exactly what she’d done, upon rereading the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary. “Have had reason to confront this upsetting fact: 87% of my kindergarten memories are in fact plagiarized from Ramona the Pest,” she tweeted last month.

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