What the Science of Memory Can (and Can’t) Reveal About the Truth in Memoir ‹ Literary Hub

On a cold, clear evening in February 2002, on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation where my mother had grown up, my brother and cousin were tracked down by the FBI. Looking at FBI photos intended to incriminate my brother changed me, and ultimately my writing.

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After many years of publishing poetry, I began to turn to prose: oblique writing no longer seemed to respond to what needed to be said. I set out to write about family, land, race, and addiction on the prairies of South Dakota, but as I tried to piece together my brother’s story, I kept coming across broken, forgotten fragments of my own life, and realized I felt that the book I wrote had to also be about that unfolding hidden story of mine, and also about the stakes we can have in forgetting, and the ways in which memory modifies our inner stories.

I read and reread a lot of memoirs, looking not only for stories of lives, but also for the disjunctions and changes of this memory over time. One memoir I went back to was Lucy Grealy’s from 1994 Autobiography of a Face, whose many perspectives on remembering illuminate the complex workings of memory.

While Grealy’s book recalls a traumatic series of operations during her childhood to remove a large cancerous part of her jaw, and then the many surgical attempts to reconstruct her face, the book’s strength lies in the psychological struggle that this everything entails, and in deciphering the complexity of memory’s overlays. One passage focuses on Lucy’s memory of a job she had at the age of fourteen – taking ponies to children’s birthday parties – and how her enjoyment of the job was marred by the fear that her face might frighten the children.

Years later, when she accidentally sees her face in the background of one of the party photos, her writing shifts the verb tense and gives the reader, in the present, her experience of looking at the photo: ‘I’m holding on to a little dark brown pony whose name I don’t remember. I look frail and thin and certainly strange, but I don’t look nearly as disgusting as I thought at the time.’

I read and reread a lot of memoirs, looking not only for stories of lives, but also for the disjunctions and changes of this memory over time.

She then gives back to the reader: Through looking at the photo, at the previous present physical moment of a party going on around her, and then, through the sounds and smells of the horse trailer, moving forward in time again to the present tense of holding the snapshot, and thinking about how “we are going to change into the people we need to be.”

Sven Birkerts, in his 2008 book The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Once Again, examines these pages of Grealy’s with the precision of a scientist, and depicts her ‘shifting unobtrusively from fantasy to direct description, to retrospective interpretation, to pure sensory memory, to reflective questioning, giving her reader an advance indication of the complexity that lies within shop.”

Birkerts, himself a memoirist, clarifies Grealy’s journey, from the expectation that her sight will be restored, to the recognition that her ‘liberation’ will be something much more internal, and he also explores the reader’s experience of this consciousness : ‘Being witness in this way to the encounter of the self with its assumptions and illusions is the personal reckoning in literary form one of the great rewards of reading memoir.

Many elements of Sven Birkerts’ argument for the importance of memoir, and the way memory works in memoir, are implicitly reflected in a new book, Why we remember (Doubleday 2024), by Charan Ranganath, professor of psychology and neuroscience, and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis.

Ranganath examines the history and current scientific study of memory and forgetting: how these ongoing processes occur in the mind and influence almost everything we do both privately and in our broader lives. Discussing both the internal and social aspects of remembering, Ranganath notes that almost half of people’s conversations are about storytelling and reminiscing.

Although his book is not a memoir, it uses some elements of memoir: he knows that the use of a clear voice, and recollections of his own, will help guide his reader through the technical information he presents to us. As a guide, he introduces us to his individual self, and as he explains experiments and findings that demonstrate how our minds absorb the things we have experienced, he often takes us into his life to provide examples, such as the disastrous paddleboarding excursion with a colleague that, when they later recalled it together, led to further discoveries about how sharing stories can provide new perspectives on memory.

According to Ranganath, our memories are constantly changing in subtle ways: “When we remember, we do not passively repeat the past. Accessing a memory is more like pressing ‘play’ and ‘record’ at the same time.” When we return to the past in our thoughts, we have more information from the present that can adjust our sense of that past.

But he pushes back against those who may overestimate this fact: ‘Media articles about the malleability of memory often wildly extrapolate from studies of memory updating, suggesting that we never rely on everyone’s memory of events that happened long ago.” These kinds of claims are dangerous, he says, especially when it comes to traumatic memories, and are “contrary to science.”

Most experimental psychologists, he confirms, “agree that people can accurately remember many aspects of traumatic events, and that updating memories rarely leads to people forming completely new memories for extreme or traumatic events.” He also explains that because of the pain of remembering trauma, it is understandable that many survivors unconsciously try to keep the memories “out of mind.”

But if you haven’t thought about a traumatic experience for a long time, and even forget that you remembered it in the past, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. “When we later find ourselves in a particular context or situation, for example when we revisit a location where a trauma occurred, we may recall an incident that we would otherwise have forgotten,” he says.

I experienced this when I looked at photos given to my brother’s attorney by the federal prosecutor. My brother had been charged with meth distribution and conspiracy, and was awaiting a conviction that could result in five to 20 years in prison, depending on which charge remained. Wanting to get my opinion on the Discovery photos of places he said he had never been, my brother asked me to look at them in his office at the family farm he was then running.

That house was built on the former site of my grandparents’ old house, and as I stared at the scenes of meth labs—dark junk sheds, rooms in dingy trailers with covered windows, basements full of pipes and bottles and buckets and cans— I started to shudder as I thought back to the damp, dirty cellar of the older farmhouse that had once stood on the same spot as the house I was in: the messy cellar strewn with pots and cans and hoses and machine parts, a place where I was brought home late on nights when I was little and stayed with my grandparents and my uncle who lived with them.

I had frozen the memory of the way my uncle made me stay quiet in the mud-smelling dark, of the way he told me not to tell anyone I was going to the basement. I had frozen and kept what he had done to me there ‘out of my mind’, Ranganath says. Those snapshots that had nothing to do with me brought back a fear I had separated from myself.

My hands on my brother’s desk were shaking, as if the chair beneath me was hanging over the dark, cluttered basement that was no longer there. My brother’s problems had brought out of the darkness a problem of mine that I had long since hidden, even from myself.

I began to understand that my brother’s private problems and mine were more intertwined than I had thought, that I needed to explore the origins of our various attempts to lose parts of ourselves. Sven Birkerts shows that memoirs of early trauma, although they search for hidden patterns between past and present, often fail to convey a clear narrative sense: “Rather than assuming continuity, they must reflect at the deepest level and on the somehow compensate for its destruction.”

This describes how we follow books like Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial ride, that of Mary Karr The Liars Club and that of Richard Hoffman half the house memoir of self-examination whose precise details and unique voice bring stories back to life stories that had been buried – stories of a mother’s murder, of emotional and physical abuse in childhood, of family violence and loss that envelops the sexual exploitation of a boy by his primary school football coach. Birkerts helped me see how trusting language can not only enable the uncovering of such memories from the realm of confusion and denial, but also change the narrator’s relationship to himself.

We need both personal voices and objective research to achieve a deeper understanding of remembering.

Every memoirist must make choices about what material to include and exclude in order to discern a book’s voice and shape its story. Likewise, any scientific study of memory will select limited (usually quite random) experiences to examine across many subjects in order to arrive at general conclusions.

We need both personal voices and objective research to achieve a deeper understanding of remembering. Continued scientific research can allow us to know how our senses about who we have been and are now formed, just as individual memories can help us understand the Real-of selfhood, and the ways in which the self develops and changes over time.

If, as Charan Ranganath says, memory always changes subtly as our experience changes, memoirs can especially show us how this happens, through texts that reveal the interplay between past and present in specific lives.