225. Cascades of Memory
Frida Kahlo, Árbol de la Esperanza (Tree of Hope), 1946
Memory is such a curious thing. It’s famously fallible, as a journalism teacher of mind highlighted with a simple exercise.
When I started writing my memoir Between Two Kingdoms, I gave myself a straightforward task: write twenty scenes. At least I thought it was straightforward. In fact, remembering enough detail to make a scene come alive is challenging, for any number of reasons—maybe because an event didn’t imprint very deeply, or you blocked it because it was painful. I struggled. Each day before I sat down to write, I would close my eyes and try to visualize a particular moment by running through all the senses. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes I came up blank.
It reminds me of something the poet Craig Morgan Teicher once said in a workshop, as we were going around the room, each naming books we’d recently read and loved. He said trying to recall things on the spot can sometimes feel like you’re reaching into a goldfish pond—the fish scatter. Those efforts to dip into the well of memory often felt like that for me.
In the end, I relied on many different sources to cull details, reconstruct timelines, and recreate those scenes. I went back to old journals and emails and medical records, and I interviewed friends and family to tap their memories. But one of the richest and most generative sources was right there in my hand: my phone. We often think of our devices as great distractions, and that’s certainly been true for me. But my phone was also a powerful tool that helped me recover absent or patchy memories. And more than just the specifics of what I was wearing on a certain day or what the weather was like, it provided the whole outlay—the lead-up to the moment in question, as well as the aftermath.
Memory is such a curious thing. It’s famously fallible, as a journalism teacher of mind highlighted with a simple exercise. It was a class about war reporting, and on the first day, he placed a photograph on a projector. Then he turned it off and told us to describe it—and of course we all recalled it differently. Some said the figure in the photograph’s coat was blue; others vehemently insisted it was green.
But even the slips and lapses can be fertile sites for exploration, as so many brilliant memoirists have shown us. I’m thinking of Tara Westover’s Educated, which begins, “My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it happened.” I’m thinking of my late mentor David Carr’s The Night of the Gun, which also hinges on a memory—one that charted the course of his life, one that he later learned he’d gotten completely wrong. I’m thinking of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, where the opening scene, drawn from her early childhood, is filled with such striking detail that it seems impossible she could’ve remembered it, but we as readers understand: this is what memory feels like, how it lives in us, moves us, shapes us.
And what I find most interesting about this trove of photos on my phone is that it can unlock cascades of memory, of days and details that I thought were buried. And that allows me to reflect on what I’ve remembered, and what I’ve forgotten—which is equally interesting—and to begin to tackle the question of why.
