The Hard Art of Remembering and Memoir-Writing
In which Teófilo confesses the difficulty of remembering and ordering his memories.
“Memories are both helpful and hurtful and we decide which to keep alive.”
― Steve Goodier
A Memoir Isn't a Chronicle
I pass on to my Mercie every pre-draft essay of these memoirs I write. It is a mandatory review, because she wishes I keep some things private, but also for accuracy. In fact, she detected some life episodes I'd misremembered on my previous essay. She's right, of course.
Memoir-writing is an art, not a science.
It's not surprising that bias and self-censorship damages everyone's internal narrative. The story we tell ourselves suffers from gaps and disorder. By disorder I mean we - I - have failed to order some events in their proper order of actuality. These I'll fix on the definitive draft, but others will go uncorrected because I didn't see them as wrong at first. These flaws are different from those events I choose to hide because I don't wish to share with others. This is the iceberg effect I'll talk about in the introduction to the final draft. That is, I tell the reader the bit I remember or want to be remember, but the reader must assume a deeper reality.
That's the difference between writing a memoir from chronicle. Memorialists are more concerned with transmitting the subjective experience of each event. The ground-fact is important. Yet, the memorialists' description of how the event shaped them is most important. At least this is my view.
As a consequence, writing one's memoir is an art not a science. It isn't strict historiography. It's not a mere gathering of chronological facts. Rather, the memoir is a coming to terms with the event as lived and experienced. This kind of writing involves, not only my memory and sorting abilities, but my entire person. It is me placing a mirror before myself, but the mirror is foggy. I see parts of myself on that mirror, the ones I want to see, while I guess at others and yet others, I ignore or fail to see.
Psychological Trauma as a Memory Shredder
Then there's the fact of later-in-life psychological trauma. In the late 2000s I developed full-fledged clinical depression. It's been chronic ever since and controlled by prescribed medications to this day. The onset had a trigger, as it is beyond the scope of this memoir. The tragic thing is that, to deal with the trauma, I either forgot or almost forgot many formed memories. It's like I shredded or burned many good or neutral memories that I'd tied to the bad ones. By forgetting the bad I also forgot many of the good ones. Now I'm forced to look at photo albums and talk to my Mercie to remember many of our memories of our early life together. Others I'll have to reconstruct by reading my journals, which I started keeping in 1996. (I could've started writing journals even earlier, but Mom told me it was a girlish thing to do. She was raising no sissies. Also, she might've been afraid of what I would put into writing about our lives together).
Age is Having an Impact
I can't deny it, but age is also taking its inexorable toll. I can't remember as well as I used to. Oftentimes I forget even the word I was looking for to write with. Whenever that happens, I take a circuitous route of synonym search to find the right word. It's always the word I had at my tongue's tip but that then escaped me. Yes, I'm feeling myself wane. To remember is to wane, to burn oneself with the passage of time.
I ask for your continued patience and forbearance for a man struggling to remember things in their right order. I will continue writing these faulty memoirs. Someone somewhere might find value from my memoirs. Someone somewhere might get to know themselves, if not the Lord, better.