Memoirs and memories

Recent conversations with potential clients for personal memoirs have made me think a lot about who tells stories and what kinds of stories they tell.

Of course, this isn’t really anything new for me. Since first becoming interested several years ago in helping people to write their memoirs, I’ve devoted plenty of thought to questions about personal story-telling. But as we consider more and more potential projects, the questions become increasingly interesting.

For example, because much of our potential clientele comes from the senior demographic, where memory loss is sometimes an issue,we’ve been asked how we can write about someone’s life when his or her memory seems so spotty. That’s an easy one for us to answer: we can bring in family members and close personal friends of the subject to help jog his or her memory, retelling stories that the memoir subject has told many times in the past. 

Sometimes these stories help the memoir subject to remember related stories. Sometimes one family member will remember one anecdote and another family member will remember a related one, and soon we have a whole stream of stories flowing.

But just as often, family members who think their elderly relative will have trouble with a memoir project because of perceived memory loss is pleasantly surprised to find out that the subject can remember stories from the past just fine. This makes sense, actually: memory loss in seniors often relates more to short-term memory than long-term. As the typical joke goes, people who can’t remember where they left their car keys can still remember the name of their second grade teacher from 80 years ago. But this works to the advantage of us memoir writers. We don’t need to know where your car keys are; we need you to remember what matters to you from the past.

Questions also arise about what people may not choose to tell. Our answer is that we help people write memoirs, not autobiographies. They are free to include or leave out whatever they wish. Accuracy is certainly helpful, but comprehensiveness isn’t necessary. We encourage memoir subjects to tell the stories they choose to pass on and leave out the ones they would rather not have figure into an overall reflection on their lives.

What becomes more apparent to us every day is that not only does everyone have a story to tell – after all, that’s the basis of our memoir-writing business – but everyone also has someone who wants to hear their story. It may be a large and diverse audience; it may be just one person. It may be several decades of students or devotees of someone’s professional persona; it may be one spouse or one child. But we have yet to find anyone who can’t find a single ready ear eager to hear the story they can pass on, or a single ready pair of eyes to read the text, increasingly engrossed in the story of a person they thought they knew but about whom they may still have so much more to learn.

If I heard it, I'll remember it

I was making a quick stop at the general store here in town when I ran into a woman I had met only once, at a New Year’s Eve party six months ago. She was buying a cake mix to make a Summer Solstice cake and mentioned that her elder daughter was home from college for the summer and doing an internship nearby. “And is she still seeing Henry?” I asked.

The woman looked briefly stunned. “How do you know about Henry?”

“You told us on New Year’s Eve. Oh, and by the way, I was thinking of you recently because of a novel I’m reading that reminded me of how you and your husband started dating in high school.”

Now she looked even more astonished. Oops, I’d done it again. I’m usually more careful, but because our encounter was unexpected, I’d let my guard down.

I have this very, very peculiar problem. Though this is entirely self-diagnosed, my theory is that I have a phonographic memory: not a photographic memory, where I remember what I see, but phonographic, where I remember what I hear. Specifically when people are telling me anecdotes about their lives. So when I’m talking to friends or acquaintances, I routinely refer to trivial details that they’ve relayed to me in the past, only to find them astonished and sometimes a little disturbed that I recall those details.

In my thirties, I finally realized that this tendency made me a bit of a social oddity and learned to rein it in. Now I pretend not to know things about people simply because I know there’s no way those people will remember having shared those details with me. Occasionally, people find it flattering that I remember the littlest stories they’ve recounted. For example, the mother of one of my daughter’s friends was amused when I remembered that her sons named a vitamin after their aunt, and now I always ask after Aunt Vitamin when I see this mom. But other people just find it weird, almost as if I’ve been spying on them. “What do you mean, how was my college roommate’s layover in Iceland?” they’ll snap, having long forgotten themselves that they mentioned to me one day at the post office that their roommate was en route to Europe via Iceland that very day.

And sometimes it makes certain events a little more boring than they might otherwise be. When I meet friends-of-friends, I can recall every detail that our mutual friend has told me about them – details that people often share as small talk at weddings and other get-togethers. So sometimes I pretend not to know that someone follows a vegan diet or once dated a U.S. senator’s son simply so that we’ll have something to talk about when we meet.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to talk to a newspaper columnist whose work I’d followed for a long time. I mentioned finding it funny that her son confused his kindergarten teacher with his rabbi. “My son is a senior in high school,” she said, sure I was thinking of someone else.

“But you wrote about it once,” I told her.

“I wrote a column about my son mistaking his kindergarten teacher for our rabbi?”

“Not a whole column. You just mentioned it.”

She clearly had no memory of including this tiny detail in a column that was probably about an entirely different topic. But I remembered.

I assume this phonographic memory is related to the fact that I became a journalist, though I’m not sure which came first: the interest in telling other people’s stories, or the improbable aptitude for remembering what I’ve heard. I tend to think I’m unusually attentive to what people tell me; thus I remember. But I suspect it’s somewhat physiological in nature as well, something about cognitive patterns. My sisters and my mother are both very good at remembering people’s stories as well, though I don’t think they’ve found it to be quite the social liability I have.

No matter; professionally it’s tremendously useful. I don’t need a Rolodex; it’s all in my memory, whether I need to contact someone who has a family member with a food allergy or track down a source who has a neighbor that works for NASA. And some of my friends have even learned to take advantage of me as a resource, which I fully support. One close friend routinely calls me when she needs to fact-check certain details of her own life. “What was the name of the town where I lived when I was studying in Russia?” she’ll ask. “What were the circumstances of the case I heard the first time I had jury duty?”

For a writer, this total recall is not a bad thing. Perhaps it will lessen somewhat with age. But in any case, I’ve learned to hold back most of the time so that I don’t come across like a stalker when I encounter acquaintances about whom I know far more than they realize. Except for times like today when I briefly lose those inhibitions.

The woman I ran into in the general store said that her daughter and Henry were not currently seeing each other. I’ll be more prudent about bringing up the subject next time we meet, which probably won’t be until next New Year’s Eve if then. But when I see her, I can ask how the Summer Solstice cake she made for her younger daughter and friends came out. There is that one advantage, after all: I’m never tongue-tied at parties. And if the CIA has any questions about anyone I’ve ever met, they know where to find me.

A trivial prank -- and big questions about memory retrieval

It was a very improbable set of circumstances that caused me to ponder the nature of memory for much of the past 24 hours. Even knowing that there must be centuries of research and reams of scholarship dedicated to the topic of brains and memory, of what and how our minds remember, I find it’s the most trivial events that make me stop and wonder how our brains really work.

In my case, it began with a silly practical joke that someone played on me over the weekend.

My son took part in a baseball exhibition event at the baseball field complex in the town next to ours. Hundreds of kids played games of baseball and took part in skills competitions using four fields in the space of about four hours. Because of the magnitude of the event and the number of people at the field, a gourmet sandwich shop from a nearby town set up a barbeque concession stand and asked the league organizers to get some parent volunteers to help on the selling end while they ran the grill. As I understood it, there was some small fundraising component involved, so parents were encouraged to sign up for a shift.

I didn’t know until I got there that the caterers running the concession stand were the same ones I worked for a couple of summers when I was in college, but as I slipped on my plastic gloves for a turn behind the counter, I was looking forward to a chance to catch up with the owner, whom I run into at events in the area or at his own sandwich shop only about once every ten years. His name was Rick Gordon, and he’d been great fun to work for back when I was in college. He had a wife and three daughters who were still young the last time we’d chatted. I was curious to hear what was new with all of them. Coincidentally, in the late 1990s I had a co-worker named Karen Stroman whose husband Peter was close friends with Rick Gordon, so occasionally when there was a social gathering outside of work Karen’s husband Peter would give me an update on the Gordon family, but for the most part I didn’t know much about what had gone on with them over the past decade.

The thing was, as I took my place behind the counter, I wasn’t entirely sure it was Rick Gordon manning the grill. In our few past encounters, I’d been surprised by how young he continued to look; this time he definitely looked older. But it had been ten years; that made sense. We made eye contact, and I could tell he recognized a familiar face even if he didn’t know exactly who I was. “Rick Gordon?” I asked. “Yes!” he said. “I’m Nancy West. I used to work for you.” “I know that! I recognized you!” he answered.

He introduced me to his barbeque assistant, a college kid named Matt. I turned back to the counter and sold some hamburgers and hot dogs, but when the initial crowd subsided, Rick and I started chatting. I worked the concession stand for two hours; every now and then we’d get a surge of business, but we also had plenty of down time to talk. Even if I might not have recognized him, his voice was familiar, they way voices are years later, with an unforgettable twang. I asked about his three daughters. Two are in college now; one in high school. I asked about business; he said it was good. I mentioned a rumor I’d heard that he might be opening a restaurant in a vacant space near his shop; he said he’d considered it but decided against it.

I didn’t mention our mutual friends Karen and Pete Stroman, since I had nothing particular to say about them. Occasionally Rick’s assistant Matt entered the conversation too, and then I’d go back to selling and we’d drop the thread, then resume it later. At one point, Rick went to his van to get more supplies. “I’m so impressed that they’re still in this business,” I said to Matt when he was gone. “When I worked for Rick and Paula, they had just bought the shop and were just starting out. It’s such a hard business to be in and I’m so impressed that they’ve been so successful.” Matt smiled politely but looked a little bit oddly at me. Rick hadn’t mentioned his wife Paula at all; I wondered if maybe they were not still married. The restaurant business is known for being hard on family life. Matt clearly wasn’t going to go down that road. He simply concurred it’s a tough business and the Gordons had done well at it.

Two hours later we were finally getting ready to close up shop. “Nancy, I gotta tell you something,” Rick said suddenly. I wondered if it was about his wife. “I’m not Rick Gordon.” I looked at him, bewildered but silent, trying to marshal my puzzlement. “I am someone you know, though.” One more beat went by and then the jigsaw puzzle pieces in my brain clattered together. That distinctive twangy voice wasn’t Rick’s at all.

“No,” I said, and it was one of those fabled moments when the words come out exactly concurrent with the idea being formed in your mind, so you feel like you’re speaking in tongues. “You’re not Rick; you’re Peter Stroman.” Of course: the stature, the twang, even the look that seemed a little more aged than I expected of Rick: not Rick at all, but his good friend Peter, husband of my former co-worker Karen.

“I’m really sorry to fool you,” Peter said. “You thought I was Rick when you first got here, and I thought it would be funny to pretend I was. Then it started to seem like we were on a reality show. And everything I told you about the store and Rick’s girls and their summer vacation plans and everything else is true. Matt is his nephew. I was right about all of it, right, Matt?”

Poor Matt looked bewildered. “Yeah, I just didn’t really know why you were doing it.”

“Well, now we have to start all over again so you can tell me about what’s going on with you, and Karen, and your girls!” I said, because I do always love catching up with old acquaintances.

So Peter took about five minutes to catch me up on his family, and then he apologized again for the ridiculously drawn-out prank and said again that it reminded him of being on a reality show.

So okay, whatever. As I think it over two days later, I see it as kind of a dumb thing to do and a little bit mocking of me, but really I don’t care that much. It just doesn’t particularly matter.

What perplexes me isn’t about Peter; it’s about me. Somewhere in my brain, I must have known. Peter actually has a quite distinctive voice, and it is different from Rick’s. Some corner of my brain had to be remembering that voice and know it belonged to someone other than Rick Gordon; some other part of my brain had to remember it was Peter’s. And yet the thought simply wasn’t able to bubble to the surface.

At the same time, another part of me keeps asking what would have happened if it had. Suppose at some point during those two hours, a voice in my head had suddenly said, “Wait a minute, that’s not Rick. That’s Peter Stroman.” What would I have done at that point? Would I actually have looked at him and said “You’re fooling me. You’re not who you said you were.” That’s really hard to picture. This is someone twenty years older than me whom I used to work for, after all. (Or that’s who I thought it was, anyway.) We’re a little old and a little far removed from each other for pranks. Is it possible the reason my brain never kicked in to full memory retrieval gear is that it just would have been too weird to have to deal with the consequences?

I don’t know. Last year I read a memoir by Jill Price called The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science, about a woman whose brain recalls every detail of every day of her life. It’s a very strange syndrome and, to hear Price describe it, not an enviable one either. The memoir is fascinating because of what it tells us about how the brain works: both in typical people, where the brain holds on to critical information and details and allows the rest to be lost in the blur of time, and in non-typical people like Price who is nearly driven to distraction by the amount of clamor in her mind from remembering everything that ever happened to her and losing nothing to the blur of time.

I’m generally someone with a good memory, which is one reason I’m so curious about why this time it didn’t compute. I’ll never know; nor will I ever really understand why Peter Stroman spent two hours playing a practical joke on me. Maybe the lesson is one about attention, though: being more attentive to details, paying closer attention to what’s going on. I’m not sure, and as I said, I don’t particularly care about being the object of the prank. It’s left me with a provocative nagging question about how memory works, a question yet to be answered.