The Fiction of Memories
October 14th, 2010 by Brunonia Barry
I’ve never written a memoir or anything vaguely resembling one. Still, one of the questions that readers most often ask me is: “How much of your story came from your own life?”
I never know quite how to answer. My topics to date have been rather dark: abuse, suicide, alcoholism, mental illness. When looked at in this obvious way, my immediate answer would be “none of it.” But if I really consider each book, I have to admit that some very obvious subplots and descriptions of place have come from my experiences and therefore from my memory.
I don’t think anyone who writes will find this surprising. We often draw from memory even when we have no idea that we’re doing it. But what if memory is flawed?
I firmly believe that two people who experience the same event seldom remember it in the same way. My first book was loosely based on this idea. I find this fascinating but not all that surprising. When emotions are involved (and aren’t they always?), memories can be severely altered. But last weekend, I realized just how creative everyday memory can be.
My husband and I were walking downtown, enjoying the first glimpses of fall, when I noticed some horse chestnuts that had fallen from a tree. I picked one of them up, and it triggered a memory of collecting them from the schoolyard when I was in fourth grade and taking them home to my mother to roast. I could remember the feeling of the smooth chestnuts in my hand. I remembered putting them first in my pockets and later in my lunchbox. I also recall their smoky smell as my mother roasted them, and I remember thinking that the holidays would be coming soon.
This memory filled me with a warm feeling of home. It was so vivid and easy to recall that I actually believed it was true. It wasn’t. My first hint that something wasn’t right was in the name of the tree. It wasn’t a chestnut tree. It was a horse chestnut. Unless you are a deer, horse chestnuts are poisonous. My mother never would have roasted and fed them to us. At least I hope she wouldn’t have.
The memory correction jarred me. How could I have been wrong about this for all these years? I know that I collected the chestnuts. I remember separating them from their jackets. I can still smell them roasting.
Then I realized that I had another memory of chestnuts. It was soon after I moved to Manhattan, and, during the holidays, the street vendors were doing the roasting. The smell was wonderful. It made me look forward to Christmas and home.
As soon as that memory was corrected, the real one came into focus. I’d collected the horse chestnuts all right, a lot of them, but I never took them home. Instead, I divided them among my friends. Remembering what we actually did with them shocked me. We hurled them at each other as if they were rocks, or snowballs.
As the memories came back to me, I started to think about story. How would I approach this if I were trying to write it? What are the differences between a story that is saved in your memory and a story that you create on the page?
These days, I probably wouldn’t write a story about my mother roasting Christmas chestnuts. It may seem lovely to me, but it’s too sentimental and a bit of cliché. Though I enjoyed the false memory for years, it’s not a story that I can write. But running through the streets of my hometown after school, grabbing and flinging chestnuts as fast as I can, now that intrigues me. For little ladies who wore dresses to school and weren’t allowed to throw rocks, we were rather aggressive. Did we really throw them at each other? Did anyone get hurt?
So now my writer’s brain is taking over. What about a fourth grade girl who is not allowed to throw rocks but who lobs chestnuts? What does this say about her? Who was her intended target? Is she a tomboy? Is she a bully? Is she the victim of a bully? My creative mind is reeling with the possibilities.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the difference between a story we create in memory and one we create on the page lies in the questions that we ask ourselves as writers. Outside of a therapy session, we don’t often ask the same questions of our memories. We don’t challenge them. We simply play them back over and over. In the writer’s world, we pull and stretch and distort an idea until we’ve examined all of its possibilities and potential meanings.
I jotted down my memory story for future use, the real one not the fake. I expect it will show up in a book one of these days, not as me, not as anyone I know, but in some character I’ll create along the way.
So the next time a reader asks me how much of my own life and memory is in my work, I will answer “quite a bit.” Not in the way one might expect it and certainly not in the way I once believed, but it’s there, if one looks carefully. It’s making art out of found objects: the elements may be familiar, but what they become is something else entirely.
How much of your writing comes from real life or from your memories of what is real?
Love the analysis of the chestnut scene. I have sentimental memories of Christmas chestnuts, too. I tried to make them for my kids this past December and it wasn’t nearly as great as I remembered. *sigh*
Another problem with writing from memory–sometimes taking something *exactly* from your memory doesn’t work well in fiction, as I learned when my agent told me the one scene I’d cut and pasted from childhood wasn’t believable or realistic enough. : 0
My family made hay with that one!
Great post, great question. I remember once hearing Andre Dubus III speak. He reminded us, his audience, that a writer’s greatest source of inspiration is often curiosity. In other words, what happens when a particular set of characters encounters a particular situation? This curiosity plays a bigger role in my own inspiration than personal experience. Brunonia, your sentence in this post “What about a fourth grade girl who is not allowed to throw rocks but who lobs chestnuts” pretty much sums up how that process goes. A snippet of memory plus a big dose of curiosity.
I’m often asked the same question about how much of the story of Veronica’s Nap, my novel-on-a-blog, came from my own life. Yes, I lived in the south of France. But more than anything, that experience made me curios about what it would feel like to actually FEEL the peaceful laziness that the landscape there suggests. Goodness knows I’ve never felt it (but have longed to)!! Hence the main character: a figment of my curiosity.
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I think a lot of what comes into fiction from our own lives is emotional memory, too. The facts of my characters’ lives bear little if any, resemblance to my own, but I know that to empathize with their deepest longings, fears and regrets, I’ve had to tap into my own emotional history.
It’s funny: sometimes non-writer friends who know I’m writing a novel will ask, “Am I in your book?” I tell them no, but perhaps I should say, “No, but the way you made me feel once is.” (Hmm, on second thought, that might not sound so good. I think I’ll keep that to myself after all.)
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What a lovely post. You painted the memories (both real and fake) as well as your thoughts about them so vividly. Then, this was genius:
“Outside of a therapy session, we don’t often ask the same questions of our memories. We don’t challenge them. We simply play them back over and over. In the writer’s world, we pull and stretch and distort an idea until we’ve examined all of its possibilities and potential meanings.”
Thanks for some great food for thought!
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ann Marie Gamble and Tracy Hahn-Burkett, Sharon Bially. Sharon Bially said: The not-so-fine line between fiction and memories, by @BrunoniaBarry, @ Writer Unboxed http://bit.ly/bo7a0r [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bruno Scartozzoni, Phaze Books. Phaze Books said: #writing The Fiction of Memories: I’ve never written a memoir or anything vaguely resembling one. Still, one of th… http://bit.ly/cotfx3 [...]
I recall my first crit partners saying, “Just because it’s right doesn’t make it good” when they’d comment on something they had problems with, and I’d say, “but it happened.” I’m sure I have a lot of mixed-up memories, but right now, I can’t remember them!
Terry
Terry’s Place
Romance with a Twist–of Mystery
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It seems that every person who reads something you’ve written just knows they’ve uncovered the real you or recognize something in it – even if you had something entirely different in mind. But I do think we write with a personal point of view influenced by experiences and observations. But the actual story, well, that’s fiction.
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perhaps ‘voice’ plays into this as well. Some of our real life half-memories, half-do overs if i could, are filtered through our voice into a story. I’ve made up a lot of situations my characters have been in, but how and why they experience them the way they do, well, that part’s mine. great post! t
Thanks for the great insights.
There are a few things I have written that have actually happened, and, yes, those details are always the least believable.
I love idea of curiosity being the greatest source of inspiration.
This was food for thought! Thanks for thinking out loud on this concept.
Patricia
http://pmpoetwriter.blogspot.com/
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In my writing group, we say “Zero points for accuracy!”
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I think most people do this with their childhood memories. Perhaps it is because our brains are still forming, or because we are nostalgic for a better past. That, actually, seems to be a human pastime: idealizing the past, making it into some golden age where society was good and didn’t have all the same problems as today.
So far I’ve only transferred one of my real-life experiences into a novel, when one of my characters faced a similar rejection I had. Of course, I didn’t make her a carbon copy of me, and though she had similar emotions, she reacted a bit differently to them. But I’m sure something in my subconscious has influenced my work more than I’ve recognized.
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A couple years back I was at a conference where a guest speaker explained her research into memory and the human brain’s ability to manipulate memory and for it to accept external manipulations. It was really a fascinating (and somewhat scary) discussion. There have been several instances where I remembered an event from childhood, only to have an older (all are at least 9.5 years older) sibling contradict the memory.
As storytellers, I think it’s inevitable that you incorporate yourself into the story. What we write is a culmination of everything we’ve absorbed through living. Some of “us” is bound to come out on the page eventually.
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That was such an interesting and vivid illustration of the connection between memory and writing. I’ll have to analyze some of my scenes to figure out where they were born. Great post!
Erika Robuck´s last blog ..Review- The Children’s Book
Great post! I face a similar challenge with my memories though I am writing memoir. How many of my memories are true or have I distorted them? All I can do is write what I believe is the emotional truth.
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