"Memories, light the corners of my mind."

Memories

“From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.”
Janet Frame

I met with my writing group, which yesterday, turned out to be just my friend, Ellen, and me. Consequently, we had time to sit and talk for a couple of hours about writing and memory. We spoke of the way that memories from childhood, which we think are etched in our minds with great detail and clarity, are really our individual experience of those events and are not necessarily factual. Ellen has three siblings, all of whom are still living. When they compare their memories, each of them recalls differently the same event. Memory is like that. It’s a mixture of fact and perspective, of individual interpretation and actual occurrences. When my sister, Jerrie, was living, I could ask her, “Do you remember when…?” and she would tell me her memory in minute detail and it almost never matched my own. There is no way to ‘fact-check’ memory so we write memoirs from a particular perspective of time and place. And yet, it is no less truth. It is our truth.

I have gained enough distance from my own childhood to write about it without emotional baggage weighing me down. I have worked through the anger and the disappointment and the lost opportunities and now can write with humor and, I think, a good measure of love. Some of us had relentlessly dark childhoods, but for most of us, childhood was a time of dualities—happy times, sad times, frightening times, and good ones. For all of us, there was a cast of characters who came and went and left their impressions on us to a lesser or greater degree. For me it has been loads of fun going back through them and telling their stories as I remember them.

I wish I had had the foresight to record actual events while they were happening. I didn’t start doing that until my mid-twenties; so many things have receded into vagueness and shadows. I encourage you, if you’re so inclined, to keep a journal of events and people who have an impact on you. You will not have to rely so much on faulty memory when you get old and want to talk or write about ‘the good old days.’
Keeping it real,
Jane