My incredibly faulty memory VS the memories of two writers.
Sarah Chihaya's 'Bibliophobia' and Paul Scheer's 'Joyful Recollections of Trauma', and how I can't remember specific moments to save my life.
I’ve spent a chunk of my life feeling guilty that my memory is slipshod, barely functioning, and imprecise. I can’t tell you how many times one of my friends has laughingly told me a story about myself that I don’t remember — some good time we shared that is a fondly-held recollection of theirs that sums up our happy relationship that I cannot place myself within. I never doubt their memory, because certainly these things must have happened — something happened over the course of my life — but I find it hard to place myself inside individual moments. I’ve got a blanket memory, an overlaying sense of my history with very few firm dates. It’s almost as if I took every event of a given period and averaged it together: I have the color of a romance, the feeling of party house, the blended anxieties of a workplace.
For too long, I assumed this failing on my part was due to the decade of heavy drinking and occasional drug use that marked my formative years. It seemed natural to assume that I had simply wiped away the particulars of my life by way of blown and wasted brain cells. This was a horrifying feeling, a grim and crushing realization that I had done something irreversible to myself. It didn’t do wonders for my self-worth.
A few years ago, as I was attempting to get my varied mental health concerns in line, I discovered that a more likely explanation for the vague, gray memories of my past lay in my decades-long battle with chronic depression. I began to imagine my brain as a sort of scorched desert, desperate for the rain of certain chemicals that it could not produce itself. Like any desert, plants (and memories) could not grow there.
This week, as I was reading Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia: A Memoir, I was surprised to read this paragraph:
“I am, in general, not so interested in what happens, but rather how it happens and what happens all around the happening. It makes sense, then, that I often have trouble directly explaining the events that happen to me, a difficulty that apparently extends to the way I think, the way I write, every way that I am. In telling you this nonstory about childhood, I have found it impossible to just state the facts. I can’t pinpoint almost any of what happened then in single events, both because I could never directly look at them in the first place, and because I can’t see them directly in retrospect now. I can only tell you how the tissue of time around and between them felt.”
I had to pause my reading: never has a writer so perfectly captured a feeling that felt profoundly my own. For so many years, I assumed that I was somehow broken, unique in my frustrating memory-lessness. To have that feeling so perfectly summed up is somehow relieving, no matter how irreversible my memory loss may be.
Imagine my (amused) frustration, then, also to be listening to Paul Scheer’s Joyful Recollections of Trauma, in which the comedian perfectly relates hilarious (and tragic) memories from his childhood in exacting detail. Scheer’s book feels, as I listen to it, like the antithesis of my own experience and skill; it is a book that I could never write because there are no specific memories of my childhood left to me — not exactly. Where Scheer details the exact set of events of a day when he almost lit a building on fire, I know that there was a day when I poured water down our chimney because it had started burning while I was home alone — but I couldn’t detail any part of that day. I remember the words of the thing, but I have no firm images. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing around the event; I couldn’t tell you anything more than that the event happened.
Perhaps that’s why fiction appeals to me so much: when I’m writing fiction, I can create events, and those events become concrete. I remember what happened to the characters of my book because I created them, I wrote them down, they are immortalized in a way that my own life is not.
It isn’t a replacement for my own life, but it’s a small balm.
My Work This Week at AIPT:
Co-hosted the AIPT Podcast again this week — talked about a lot of X-Men and had an overlong running gag about Biker Mice. Good times!
Some exciting Mike Allred and Jae Lee art, a hulking Iron man, and a three-headed tiger in this week’s Judging by the Cover.
I’m only rarely a games critic, but when it’s a game like Wanderstop, I realize that I’m lucky when I get to take that role.
Yelena Belova (a one-time Black Widow and occasional White Widow) is a character who has only ever been backup. This collection spotlights a lot of those stories.