Class 4 - Memory

Notes from Class 4

Welcome back!

Peer Feedback

Thanks for your My Names pieces on Canvas. We’re going to take a few minutes to share a piece of work form the last couple of days in groups, to start working on how to develop feedback. In groups, I want you to do the following.

1. Choose a piece, either your My Names piece, or your A Memory That is not a Memory piece.

2. Read your piece, or a section of the piece, out loud. Don’t preface it with anything, or explain it, but let the piece stand alone.

3. When you listen to other people in the group reading, ask yourself the following questions:

   • What struck you as powerful, novel or intriguing about the piece?
   • What did you want to know more about?
   • What didn’t work for you?

About memory

You may already have written a memory task One thing you may have realised already is that memory is not straightforward. There are things you don’t remember, things you forget, gaps. We misremember, we forget, we merge different events into one. Or we remember that something or other happened, but precisely what, we’re not quite sure… (as the singer Leonard Cohen once sang, “I can’t forget / but I don’t remember what.”).

Sometimes, when writing memoir, people worry about this, and say, “but I can’t remember everything — how can I write???”

But the good news is that you don’t have to remember everything. Part of what makes memoir fascinating is the relationship between remembering and forgetting. This is why Westover’s book is great. It offers a powerful evocation of her childhood memories; but at the same time, it Westover knows that memory is both precise but also unreliable. Think about how Westover begins chapter one with a memory that is not a memory at all. She writes: “My strongest memory is not a memory.”

Writing Exercise: Memory and Forgetting

Before we more on, I’m going to set you a short exercise on memory and forgetting. For this exercise, take yourself back in your mind’s eye to a familiar place from childhood. It might be your school classroom. Or it might be somewhere you lived.

Make a few notes about:

• What you remember.
• What you forget.

You’ll probably realise that the more notes you make about things you remember, the more you will realise how much you have forgotten. But as you make notes on things you have forgotten, you may realise that there are all kinds of things that you didn’t remember that you remembered! When you have filled a page with notes, write a short piece about this familiar place, paying equal attention to the experience of remembering and the experience of forgetting.

Write for 15 minutes.

A trip in a balloon

So let’s think more about forgetting. What is going on in Tara Westover’s memory-that-isn’t-a-memory.

What Westover shows us is that memory is flexible. There’s some fascinating research into this. In their famous research paper, “A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories” (see the link here) the researchers Kimberley Wade and Maryanne Garry used image-editing software to doctor childhood images of research subjects. The subjects were shown a number of photographs from their childhood. Among these photographs was a doctored image of the subject in a hot air balloon. The crucial thing was that none of the subjects had ever been in a hot air balloon.

But when the subjects were interviewed about the photographs, when they presented what looked like concrete evidence of their childhood ballooning experiences, with 50% of subjects, their minds filled in the gaps.

One subject, for example, said that;

‘Um, just trying to work out how old my sister was; trying to get the exact … when it happened. But I’m still pretty certain it occurred when I was in form one (6th grade) at um the local school there … Um basically for $10 or something you could go up in a hot air balloon and go up about 20 odd meters … it would have been a Saturday and I think we went with, yeah, parents and, no it wasn’t, not my grandmother … not certain who any of the other people are there. Um, and I’m pretty certain that mum is down on the ground taking a photo.’

In the light of this curious (and slightly alarming) result, the researchers conclude that memory isn’t so much about “reading off” a fixed record of past events. Instead, “the act of remembering a past experience involves generating thoughts, images and feelings from multiple sources […] and attributing those thoughts, images, and feelings to a particular past episode.”

This doesn’t mean that memory is fatally flawed. It is often incredibly accurate, and is also, of course, hugely useful in our day to day lives. But what it does mean is that we shouldn’t think of memory as like a filing system, where everything is tidily stowed away until we need it next. Nor should we see forgetting and misremembering as somehow flaws in this idealised, tidy filing system. Instead, when we are dealing with memory, we have to get to grips with the fact that we are dealing not just with remembering, but also with not-remembering, misremembering and sort-of-remembering.

Thinking Exercise: The Story You Are Told, but Don’t Quite Remember

Perhaps we all have stories that were were told in our childhood — stories that those around us insist happened, but that we don’t really remember, or don’t quite believe.

For this exercise, you are going to write the story from your childhood that you were told was true, but that you don’t remember. First, make some notes about this story. Think about:

• When you first heard the story (do you remember?)
• Who told you the story
• What the story was about
• Why it sticks in your mind
• What affect the story had on you

We’ll share some of these ideas.

Homework

Before the next session, read Fernanda Eberstadt’s amazing essay, ‘I Bite My Friends’, Granta Magazine 144, 2018. Come prepared to discuss it next time. It’s a great, powerful and unsettling piece of writing.

Also post ONE PIECE on the discussion board from your in-class work today, and comment on one other student’s work. This is a graded task. The deadline is the end of Friday this week Indochina time!