Truth, Lies, and Memories

Reading biographies has got me thinking about my own life writing. A few years ago I began writing a series of personal essays based on memories of my childhood growing up in San Antonio. I'm still at it, although to a lesser extent recently, and I continue to enjoy reminiscing. The problem with memoirs and memories more generally is that they are not to be trusted. Memory is just too unreliable. I found myself going back to check the record, sometimes testing my own memory against my wife's, which tends to be more accurate, in part because, an inveterate journal writer, she keeps better records.

It wasn't always so. I once had a family reputation for having a near perfect, even photographic, memory. I could recall events from my own past with detailed accuracy for times, places, and those involved as participants. Even as a child I would replay my favorite memories for my own entertainment, and sometimes at family gatherings for the entertainment of others. Nor was I entirely unique in this, one of my brothers was also good at recalling our childhood adventures and misadventures. My father, on the other hand, was notorious for getting mixed up. He and my grandmother would often go round and round over memories from his childhood. My mother took little interest in any of this, and preferred to live in the moment, with a keen eye out for the future. She tended to be a planner, not a reminiscer.

Every family must have versions of these same experiences. The various generations gathered around for some family occasion, recalling times gone by. This was always great entertainment for me when our multi-generational family would get together and tell tales of the old days, memories stretching back to old San Antonio, family farms, hand-built houses, the Great Depression, often illustrated with family photographs that looked like something from the last century, now the one before the last. In my mother's family the great authority when it came to memories of the past and family history was my mother's mother, my grandmother, and before her it had been her mother, my great-grandmother.

When I was a child of the mid twentieth century family memories stretched back to the late nineteenth. I could hardly believe some of the tales, the vast stretches of land once owned by my mother's family, the family dairy farm that was still in business when I was a child, just off one of the main city streets on the north side of town. Of course, our neighbors, whose house had been built a few years before ours, told me that our yard, and many of the others on the block, had been a chicken yard when they moved in. This no longer visible link to a rural past right in the midst of our own spanking new postwar suburb was somehow a magical thought, and helped me identify with the family in my primary school readers who visited a farm and had their own pony: Look, Susan. Look, Betty. See Tom. See Tom ride Pony!

But is any of this really true? It's not that I think these memories are necessarily lies, or even conscious fictions, but are they reliable? The past is irrecoverable almost immediately, as we all discover sooner or later. Even last week's meals are blurry recollections. Where did I eat lunch last Tuesday? What did I eat, who with? Oh, of course, if I think about it I can reconstruct some of it, but what was it we talked about? What did my lunchmates eat? And does any of that really matter? Why should I wish to recall what we talked about? But wasn't there something important discussed, something I wanted to tell someone else? What were the details? Do they really matter now, only a week later? And what of next week?

We live amidst a jumble of memories and recollections of experiences and conversations, and generally we imagine that we can recall them when we need to, if we want to. We can reconstruct the past. But is our reconstruction reliable? Is anyone's? If not true, are our recollections and reconstructions lies? Fictions? Many years ago I began keeping a journal. Almost every day since then, and at least two or three times each week, I have recorded a few facts about my daily life, what I was doing and thinking, stray bits of information that my future self might find amusing. And when I have gone back to look at these journal entries, sometimes to check for some stray fact, I am somewhat amused to peek at my earlier, previous self, but I'm also frequently disappointed. Often I discover that I failed to make a record of the thing I later want to know. What I later perceive to be the most important thing that happened on such and such a day, at the time it happened, I failed to make note of.

But why should we want to return to the past? As my mother used to say, you can't do anything about it now. What's done is done. Keep moving forward. It's no use crying over spilt milk. But I do want to go back, to relive, if only in memory, some of that past life. And I want it to be as accurate as possible. I don't deny that it may be a pathology. Perhaps it's not healthy, psychologically, to dwell too much in the past. Best to keep our nostalgia to ourselves. No one enjoys someone else's reminiscences. And yet there is such demand for biography and auto-biography, memoirs, and letters, seemingly all forms of life writing. It can be entertaining, like overhearing someone else's gossip, but it can also be useful equipment for living. Memories are tools for survival. Those who cannot remember the past are often condemned to repeat it. Or, at least, that's what I've read somewhere.