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The Body of Memory

Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. . . . If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else.

—N. SCOTT MOMADAY

In my earliest memory, I’m a four-year-old girl waking slowly from anesthesia. I lift my head off the pillow and gaze blearily out the bars of my hospital crib. I can see a dim hallway with a golden light burning; somehow I know in that hallway my mother will appear any minute now, bearing ice cream and 7-Up. She told me as much before the operation: “All good girls get ice cream and 7-Up when their tonsils come out,” she said, stroking my hair. “It’s your reward for being brave.” I’m vaguely aware of another little girl screaming for her mother in the crib next to mine, but otherwise the room remains dark and hushed, buffered by the footfalls of nurses who stop a moment at the doorway and move on.

I do not turn to face my neighbor, afraid her terror will infect me; I can feel the tickling urge to cry burbling up in my wounded throat, and that might be the end of me, of all my purported bravery and the promised ice cream. I keep my gaze fixed on that hallway, but something glints in my peripheral vision, and I turn to face the bedside table. There, in a mason jar, my tonsils float. They rotate in the liquid: misshapen ovals, pink and nubbly, grotesque.

And now my mother has simply appeared, with no warning or announcement. Her head leans close to the crib, and she gently plies the spoon between the bars, places it between my lips, and holds it there while I swallow. I keep my gaze fixed on her face, and she keeps her gaze on mine, though I know we’re both aware of those tonsils floating out of reach. The nurses pad about, and one of them enters the room bearing my “Badge of Courage.” It’s a certificate with a lion in the middle surrounded by laurels, my name scripted in black ink below. My mother holds it out to me, through the bars, and I run a finger across my name, across the lion’s mane, across the dry yellowed parchment.

—BRENDA

The Earliest Memory

What is your earliest memory? What is the memory that always emerges from the dim reaches of your consciousness as the first one, the beginning to this life you call your own? Some of these early memories have the vague aspect of a dream, some the vivid clarity of a photograph. In whatever form they take, they tend to fascinate us.

Memory has been called the ultimate “mythmaker,” continually seeking meaning in the random and often unfathomable events in our lives. “A myth,” writes John Kotre, author of White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, “is not a falsehood but a comprehensive view of reality. It’s a story that speaks to the heart as well as the mind, seeking to generate conviction about what it thinks is true.”

The first memory then becomes the starting point in our own narratives of the self. “Our first memories are like the creation stories that humans have always told about the origins of the earth,” Kotre writes. “In a similar way, the individual self—knowing how the story is coming out—selects its earliest memories to say, ‘This is who I am because this is how I began.’” As writers, we naturally return again and again to these beginnings and scrutinize them. By paying attention to illogical, unexpected details, we just may light upon the odd yet precise images that help our lives make sense, at least long enough for our purposes as writers.

The prominent fiction writer and essayist David James Duncan calls such autobiographical images “river teeth.” Based on his knowledge that knots of dense wood remain in a river years after a fallen tree disintegrates, Duncan creates a metaphor of how memory, too, retains vivid moments that stay in mind long after the events that spurred them have been forgotten. He writes:

There are hard, cross-grained whorls of memory that remain inexplicably lodged in us long after the straight-grained narrative material that housed them has washed away. Most of these whorls are not stories, exactly: more often they’re self-contained moments of shock or of inordinate empathy. . . . These are our “river teeth”—the time-defying knots of experience that remain in us after most of our autobiographies are gone.

Virginia Woolf had her own term for such “shocks” of memory. She calls them “moments of being,” and they become essential to our very sense of self. “I hazard the explanation,” she writes, “that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. . . . I make it real by putting it into words.” Woolf’s early moments of being, the vivid first memories from childhood, are of the smallest, most ordinary things: the pattern of her mother’s dress, for example, or the pull cord of the window blind skittering across the floor of their beach house. The memories that can have the most emotional impact for the writer are those we don’t really understand, the images that rise intuitively in our minds.

“Imagistic Endurance”

In order to flesh out those “shocks of memory” or “river teeth,” you must develop the ability—and the patience—to stay with the memory as long as you can, filling in the details using your imagination (see Chapter 11, “The Particular Challenges of Creative Nonfiction,” for a discussion of the relationship between memory and imagination). The poet Jenny Johnson has called this skill “imagistic endurance,” likening the act of sustaining our attention on images to the stamina an athlete must cultivate. Of course, it’s possible to go overboard in this direction, but in the drafting process it’s useful to keep training your writing muscles to keep going. You never know what might turn out to be important.

Many writers will use present tense to suspend a moment in time, allowing space for this sustained attention. (For an example of this technique, see “First” by Ryan Van Meter in our anthology.) For one thing, it’s more difficult to summarize in the present tense; by virtually “re-inhabiting” a memory, both writer and reader can allow the scene to unfold more deeply, and unexpected details might arise that could lead to new discoveries. (You don’t necessarily need to keep the material in present tense, if this tone doesn’t work for your piece, but by drafting in the present tense, you may be able to slow down enough to unearth new material.) Often these scenes are left to speak for themselves; the writer refrains from telling us how to interpret the scene, instead providing images as clues that allow the reader to make connections.

For example, in her short personal essay “Behind the Screen,” Jo Ann Beard sustains her attention on a small passage of time in her childhood: a Fourth of July evening when she is banished to the screened-in porch because she’s having an allergy attack. She needs to watch the activities from afar, separate from her family. From this observation post, she reports every movement her family makes, first looking closely at her older sister, who wears:

a pop-bead necklace, a Timex wristwatch, a mood ring, and a charm bracelet that makes a busy metallic rustle every time she moves her arm, which she does frequently. On the charm bracelet, between a high-stepping majorette and a sewing machine with movable parts, is a little silver book that opens like a locket to display the Teen Commandments. . . . Every few minutes she raises and lowers her right arm so the charm bracelet, which I covet, clanks up to her elbow and then slides slowly and sensuously back down to her wrist. She doesn’t bother turning around to see how I take this. She knows it’s killing me.

Beard zooms in on the smallest details (down to the specific charms on the bracelet!), and she allows these details to build a picture of the era (mood rings) and family culture (Teen Commandments), without the author needing to state this information directly. She then turns this laser gaze on her younger brother, her mother, and her father, and all the while we can feel her isolation behind that screen, as well as the buildup to the fireworks that, when they arrive, lead to a charged, suspended moment:

The sky is full of missiles. All different colors come out this time, falling in slow motion, red and blue turning to orange and green. It’s so beautiful, I have to close my eyes. My family joins the neighbors in oohing. Suddenly, as the delayed booms are heard, I have to lean forward and put my head on my knees, inhaling the scent of Bactine and dirt. Everything is falling away from me. I open my eyes.

As you can see in this excerpt, a sustained exploration—set in the present tense with attention to small sensory details such as the smells of Bactine and dirt—can create a vivid child’s perspective and voice.

In his memoir, House Built on Ashes, José Antonio Rodríguez builds his story bit by bit, creating small, self-contained scenes of key memories from his childhood, and the reader experiences it all from inside the child’s point of view. For example, in an early chapter titled “milk,” Rodríguez remembers a flash encounter with his mother that has stayed with him all these years. He had been running through the house chasing a lizard and didn’t hear his mother tell him to stop. Notice how he gives the background to the scene in past tense, but the essential moment slows down to present tense:

I don’t know why I didn’t hear her, but I didn’t. Then I got tired. I came in for a flour tortilla. I grabbed one from the stack, felt it warm in my hand. . . . And that’s when she said it, turning a tortilla on the griddle, like she’s always doing, her arm over the stove and her head over her shoulder, her chin up, like picking a fight: I don’t love you anymore.

I walk back, away from her. She looks at me that way, like to look at me hurts her eyes.

I sit on the ground on the other side of the table, stare at the dirt, hard brown. This morning I was spooning milk from a cup so it would last longer than gulping it like water. That was happening, that was here. Amá loving me was always happening, like milk that never runs out, that was here too. But now it is not happening. It has stopped. . . .

The piece of tortilla in my mouth tastes like raw dough and it sticks in my throat. I want to spit it out, but I’m not supposed to waste food. Little ants with their little stings walk trails on the ground, move around my bare feet splotchy with sweat and dirt and backsplash from peeing.

Again, the small details—tortillas on the griddle, the dirt floor, the mother at her station—all provide information about the child’s family and environment. The shock of separation from the mother, though it takes just a moment in real time, is so impactful it needs to have room on the page to expand. We stay with the narrator in that suspension of time when he feels he has lost his mother’s love forever. Thankfully, in this memory, the mother relents almost right away, pats his head and says, “C’mon, I do love you.” The child is relieved, but also transformed a bit by this rift, and he ends the short chapter by returning to the image of “a tortilla puffy and light like a cloud. She taps it and it deflates slowly, steam escaping through a little tear.”

Note how in all these examples, the authors rely on strong sensory details to build these scenes, creating images using smell, sound, touch, and taste, in addition to sight. (See later in this chapter, “The Five (or Six) Senses of Memory,” for more details on this essential writing skill.) You can practice building your imagistic endurance by trusting your memory, and your intuition, to give you the material you need to start building your own story, one “river tooth” at a time.

Metaphorical Memory

A metaphor is a way of getting at a truth that exists beyond the literal. By pinpointing certain images as symbolic, writers can go deeper than surface truths and create essays that work on many levels at once. This is what writers are up to all the time, not only with memory but with the material of experience and the world. We resurrect the details to describe not only the surface appearance, but also to make intuitive, metaphorical connections. For example, the tortilla deflating in Rodríguez’s memory reflects the deflation the child feels in that moment.

As we saw in the last section, many writers allow early memories to “impress themselves” on the mind. They do not dismiss them as passing details but rather probe them for any insights they may contain. They ask not only “what?” but “why?” Why does Beard remember that moment of isolation from her family, and why was her child self so affected by the fireworks on that particular evening? Why does Rodríguez remember that quick moment of estrangement from his mother? The memories are insistent enough that these writers spend the time necessary to embody these bits of their childhood on the page and, through the writing, perhaps discover some themes that will permeate their work, such as finding one’s place in the family, or understanding the rickety nature of love.

Muscle Memory

There is a phrase used in dancing, athletics, parachuting, and other fields that require sharp training of the body: muscle memory. Once the body learns the repetitive gestures of a certain movement or skill, the memory of how to execute these movements will be encoded in the muscles. That is why, for instance, we never forget how to ride a bike.

One cannot speak of memory—and of bodily memory in particular—without trotting out Marcel Proust and his famous madeleine. Proust dips his cookie in lime-blossom tea, and Remembrance of Things Past springs forth, all six volumes of it.

The body can offer an inexhaustible store of memories to begin any number of essays, each of which will have greater significance than what appears on the surface. Sometimes, what matters to us most is what has mattered to the body. Memory may pretend to live in the cerebral cortex, but it requires muscle—real muscle—to animate it again for the page.

The Five (or Six) Senses of Memory

By paying attention to the sensory gateways of the body, you also begin to write in a way that naturally embodies experience, making it tactile for the reader. Readers tend to care deeply only about those things they feel in the body at a visceral level. We experience the world through our senses. We must translate that experience into the language of the senses as well.

Smell

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived,” wrote Helen Keller in her autobiography. “The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief.”

We all have this innate connection to smell. Physiologically, we do apprehend smells more quickly than the other sensations, and the images aroused by smell can act as beacons leading to our richest memories, our most private selves. Smell is so intimately tied up with breath, after all, a function of our bodies that works continually, day and night.

Smells can also evoke a place in your memory quite effectively. For example, in Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” she recreates her experience of moving to New York as a young woman. Her senses take in everything, and smells are especially potent. She remembers “the warm air smelled of mildew” and “I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume.” Or in the Michel de Montaigne essay, “Of Smells” (see Anthology), smells become the animating force behind some of his strongest (and characteristically quirky) opinions.

Taste

Food is one of the most social gifts we have. For example, in “A Thing Shared,” food aficionado M. F. K. Fisher uses something as simple and commonplace as the taste of a peach pie—“the warm round peach pie and cool yellow cream”—to describe a memory of her father and sister the first time they found themselves alone without the mediating influence of the mother. The food acts as more than mere sustenance; it becomes a moment of communion:

That night I not only saw my father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister’s fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity.

This scene becomes an illustration of how we awaken to one another. It’s less about her own family than about the fleeting moments of connection that can transpire in all families, in one way or another. (See Chapter 2, “Writing the Family,” for more examples of how memories of food can be an effective way into writing about family.)

Sometimes taste can be evoked not only through the act of eating, but also by noticing a taste on the tongue. The taste of fear, for example, is often metallic, and strong emotion or illness can lead to a sensation of sourness. Or you can have a taste linger long after a meal is finished. For example, in his essay “Afternoon of an American Boy,” E. B. White remembers his first date—an awkward, tense, and hilarious occasion—this way: “In my dream, I am again seated with Eileen at the edge of the dance floor, frightened, stunned, and happy—in my ears the intoxicating drumbeat of the dance, in my throat the dry, bittersweet taste of cinnamon.” He ends the paragraph on that image, emphasizing the flavor of cinnamon, but also emphasizing how such memories are often “bittersweet.”

Hearing

Sounds often go unnoticed. Because we cannot consciously cut off our hearing unless we plug our ears, we’ve learned to filter sounds, picking and choosing the ones that are important, becoming inured to the rest. But these sounds often make up a subliminal backdrop to our lives, and even the faintest echo can tug back moments from the past in their entirety.

For example, in his short essay, “The Fine Art of Sighing” (see Anthology), memoirist Bernard Cooper uses a sound as subtle as a sigh to elucidate his relationship to his family, himself, and the world. He describes how his father sighs, how his mother sighs, and how he, himself, sighs. And, paradoxically, by focusing in on this small, simple act, Cooper reveals much larger things: his mother’s dissatisfaction with domestic life, his father’s gruff sensual nature, and Cooper’s ambivalence about his own body and sexuality. He writes:

A friend of mine once mentioned that I was given to long and ponderous sighs. Once I became aware of this habit, I heard my father’s sighs in my own and knew for a moment his small satisfactions. At other times, I felt my mother’s restlessness and wished I could leave my body with my breath, or be happy in the body my breath left behind.

Music is not so subtle but rather can act as a blaring soundtrack to our emotional lives. Think about the bonds you formed with friends over common musical passions, the days spent listening to the same song over and over. Sometimes you turned up that song as loud as you could so that it might communicate to the world—and to your deepest, deafest self—exactly the measure of your emotion. We often orchestrate our memories around the music that accompanied those pivotal eras of our lives. When you have the soundtrack down, the rest of life seems to fall into place. (See also Chapter 6, “Writing the Arts,” for further discussion on the role music can play in our writing.)

Touch

Hospitals rely on volunteers to hold babies on the infant wards. Their only job is to hold and rock any baby that is crying or in distress. The nurses, of course, do not have time for such constant care, but they know this type of touch is essential as medicine for their patients’ healing. As we grow, we are constantly aware of our bodies, of how they feel as they move through the world. Without this sense we become lost, disoriented in space and time.

Remember Rodríguez’s childhood memory from earlier in this chapter? He often uses the sense of touch as a way to evoke the atmosphere in which he grew up. For example, in his chapter titled “dark loud,” he describes a typically hot night in his home, where he sleeps in a bedroom with eight brothers and sisters. His mother lies next to him, fanning him with a shirt:

Oh, the fanning is like a big bowl of beans just for me. She runs her hand through my hair that feels wet and slithery like earthworms matted against my forehead. She raises it and blows softly and this feels good, like it is the first time. I try to turn my body because it gets hot lying on one side. I want to cool my back but there’s no room, shoulders and elbows and backs press against me like angry, pin me down.

Sometimes an essayist can also focus on the tactile feel of objects as a way to explore deeper emotions or memories. For instance, in his short essay “Buckeye,” Scott Russell Sanders focuses on the feel of the buckeye seeds that his father carried with him to ward off arthritis. They are “hollow,” he says, “hard as pebbles, yet they still gleam from the polish of his hands.” (See also Chapter 8, “The Tradition of the Personal Essay,” for more about “The Object Essay.”)

Sanders then allows the sensation of touch to be the way we get to know his father:

My father never paid much heed to pain. Near the end, when his worn knee often slipped out of joint, he would pound it back in place with a rubber mallet. If a splinter worked into his flesh beyond the reach of tweezers, he would heat the blade of his knife over a cigarette lighter and slice through the skin.

Such sensory details bring the reader into the father’s body, feeling the pound of that mallet, the slice of the skin. He never needs to tell us his father was a tough man; the images do all the work for him. These details also allow us to see the narrator, Sanders, watching his father closely, and so this scene also conveys at least a part of their relationship and its emotional tenor.

Sight

How do you see the world? How do you see yourself? Even linguistically, our sense of sight seems so tied up in our perceptions, stance, opinions, personalities, and knowledge of the world. To see something often means to finally understand, to be enlightened, to have our vision cleared. What we choose to see—and not to see—often says more about us than anything else.

Visual scenes can be rendered from various distances. We can have an extended view, taking in the scenery, the environment, the exterior details; and we can have a more focused view, zeroing in on particular details of people and places. You might think about it in cinematic terms, the way a camera will often give an “establishing shot” of the scene, then gradually move in to show the viewer the important details in a close-up.

Sometimes, when we are in unfamiliar territory or intuit that we may be in danger, our senses heighten, and this awareness can be translated into a highly visual scene on the page. For example, in her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, Maggie O’Farrell articulates several key moments in time when she felt her mortality, and she renders these moments in minute detail. For example, in the first chapter, titled “Neck” (all the chapters are labeled after body parts that were involved in the incidents), she remembers a time she met a man alone on a hiking trail. She drops us right into the scene, with no introduction or buildup:

On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears.

We are, he and I, on the far side of a dark tarn that lies hidden in the bowl-curved summit of this mountain. The sky is a milky blue above us; no vegetation grows this far up so it is just me and him, the stones and the still black water. He straddles the narrow track with both booted feet and he smiles.

I realize several things. That I passed him earlier, farther down the glen. We greeted each other, in the amiable yet brief manner of those on a country walk. That, on this remote stretch of path, there is no one near enough to hear me call. That he has been waiting for me: he has planned this whole thing, carefully, meticulously, and I have walked into his trap.

I see all this, in an instant.

This scene is cinematic in its rendering: we can see every detail clearly, from the man’s booted feet (up close) to the “stones and the still black water” (extended view). She gives us a brief flashback to establish context, then returns to the charged moment at hand. The scene feels dangerous, but she never mentions the word “danger.” She, thankfully, avoids being harmed by this man (who does, indeed, turn out to be quite dangerous), but she allows the reader inside this moment where we don’t yet know the outcome.

Of course, this is an extreme example, but we all have moments that have “struck” us in some way. We have visual details engraved in our memories, and we can render those details in visual terms on the page.

“Sixth” Sense

When we say we have a “sixth sense” about something, we usually mean that we are gaining information that isn’t obvious to our five physical senses. We’re intuiting an emotion, an intention, or an outcome; or we are feeling the presence of forces beyond our everyday control. For example, take a look at the short graphic memoir “Perdition” by Kristen Radtke (see Anthology). The scene—a moment that shows the undercurrents of a relationship between mother and daughter—is built almost entirely on the “sixth sense.”

When you practice rendering your memories in highly physical details, often these details will give rise to an intuitive sense as well. And as the older narrator looking back on a scene, this present knowledge may also color your perception of the memory and allow for a subtle prediction of what will happen in the future. You might even be able to use future tense to show this mature awareness, with phrases such as “I don’t yet know” or “I didn’t know then” inserted into the memory. (For an example of this technique, see “First” by Ryan Van Meter in our Anthology.)

Look back at the examples given throughout this chapter and see if you can find the “sixth sense” functioning in the scenes. What are the narrators’ intuiting? What kind of knowledge arises in their bodies?

Body Image

As you practice calling up and articulating memories using the body as a vehicle, you may find yourself grappling with issues of body image. Many people have struggled with perceptions of their bodies throughout their lives, and thinking about their bodies may also evoke memories of deep trauma.

For example, to open her memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay writes: “I wish I could write a book about being at peace and loving myself wholly, at any size. . . . But I soon realized I was not only writing a memoir of my body; I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight. I’ve been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets.” Such an exploration goes beyond the personal narrative; it reaches out to connect with others. Gay goes on to say: “This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided.”

In her innovative essay “People Are Starving,” Suzanne Rivecca manages to transform the issue of body image from a personal narrative to a communal story. She shows how her experience of an eating disorder is enacted in various ways among so many others through strategic use of the first-person plural (“we”) point of view. As the essay progresses, each paragraph shows both how food and eating function so differently in each person’s life, but how united the “we” becomes through this focus on body image:

Before there was pretty or ugly, before there was virginal or slutty, there was fat or skinny. We saw what happened to the girls who were fat, even if they were barely fat at all. Everything they did and said was discredited and illegitimate by default. If they were sad, they got laughed at. If they were happy, they got laughed at. Nothing they had could be pure. There was no margin for error.

Body image is so complex; it encompasses body size, clothing, skin, hair, and a multitude of other aspects that affect the way we move through the world. It can be challenging to delve deeply into this material, but such an exploration can yield great rewards—for yourself and others.

Illness Memoir

As we write about our bodies, illness—both physical and mental—can naturally emerge as an important subject for autobiographical writing. Experiences of illness often lend themselves to memoir because they are such decisive turning points and have so much impact on our lives.

In writing an illness memoir, it can be tempting to overwhelm the reader with step-by-step medical information, because all this information was relevant to you. Readers will be more likely to connect to the story if you can prune that information down and find the key moments or concrete objects that allow us deeply into your experience. For example, when Brenda was writing about a miscarriage, she found herself writing, instead, about a needlepoint kit her mother had given her. These words came out: “As I recovered from surgery, I thought only of that needlepoint, each stitch, one after the other, and mounds of color gradually developed under my hands . . . [My mother] knew that sometimes only the simplest actions are feasible, and those are the ones that lead us out of illness and back into the world.”

As with other autobiographical topics, illness can often lead to an examination of issues that go beyond the personal. You may be breaking silences, or helping remove the isolation and stigma someone with a similar illness may experience. In Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System, Sonya Huber writes:

This is a collection of unconventional essays on chronic pain; my goal with these essays was not to fix or provide advice (most of us have had too much of that) but to explore the landscape. Pain is a territory known by those who are in that land. I am in a small corner of it, and the more I see of its vastness, the more I realize how little I know. . . . I hope with these essays to add to the growing literature about what pain is and how it is experienced, imagined, and expressed so that its universal burden can be shared.

These last words speak to why we write and read any type of memoir. Yes, we care, to a certain extent, about the details of an individual life, but to hold our interest and have an impact, a personal narrative must be written in such a way that the author reaches beyond the self and connects to more communal concerns.

TRY IT

1.   First Memories

Write a scene of an early memory, perhaps your first memory. What calls out for further examination? What in this scene seems to matter to you? What are you leaving out? If you get stuck, keep repeating the phrase “I remember” to start off your sentences; allow this rhythm to take you further than you thought you could go.

2.   “Imagistic Endurance”

Once you have written down your memory, go back with this checklist in hand, and see how many more sensory details you can include. Don’t worry about going overboard or about “making things up.” Your memory holds more than you thought possible!

•   What did this memory look like? (details of colors, clothing, objects, people, etc.)

•   What did this memory sound like? (What might you have heard in the background? Music, nature sounds, city sounds, conversations, sounds of the household, etc.)

•   What did this memory smell like? (smells that might have been present, such as odors of cooking, nature, city, perfume, laundry, etc.)

•   What did this memory taste like? (taste in your mouth from food or emotion, eating food, taste of the air, etc.)

•   What did this memory feel like? (tactile sensations on the skin, textures of objects or nature or people, etc.)

•   What kind of intuition does the character experience? (a new understanding, a sense of what is really going on with the people around her, a prediction of what will happen in the future, etc.)

3.   Metaphorical Memory

Go back and look at your early memory writing. Ask yourself “Why?” Why did you remember what you remembered? Why did that moment arise? What kind of theme or idea is suggested by the details in this memory?

Once you have a theme or idea or emotion in mind, what other memories and/or scenes might also relate to this theme? Brainstorm a list. This list can provide you with lots of good material for further writing.

4.   In the preface to his anthology The Business of Memory, Charles Baxter writes, “What we talk about when we talk about memory is—often—what we have forgotten and what has been lost. The passion and torment and significance seem to lie in that direction.” What have you forgotten in your life? What are the moments that keep sliding out of reach? Write for twenty minutes, using the phrase “I can’t remember” to start off each sentence. Where does such an examination lead you?

You may find that by using this exercise you can back into the scenes and images you do remember but never knew how to approach. You can write some very powerful essays based on this prompt, exploring material that seemed too dangerous to examine head-on.

VARIATION: After you’ve lighted on some events or times you can’t fully articulate, do a little research. Ask others about their memories of that time. Find documents or photographs that may shed some light on the issue. After you’ve gathered enough evidence, write an essay that focuses on the way your memory and the “reality” either differ or coincide. Why have you forgotten the things you did?

5.   How many different “firsts” can you remember in your life? The first meal you remember enjoying, the first smell you remember wanting to smell again, the first day of school, the first book you remember reading by yourself, the first album you ever bought, the first time you drove a car, the first kiss? How does your memory of these “first” events color your perception of yourself? What kinds of metaphors do they generate for your life story?

THE SIX SENSES OF MEMORY

Smell

1.   Gather articles that you know carry some smell that is evocative for you. One by one, smell them deeply, and then write the images that arise in your mind. Write quickly, allowing the smell to trigger other sensory associations.

2.   Which smells in your life are gone for you now? Which ones would you give anything to smell again?

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: Each person brings in an object that carries some kind of strong smell and takes a turn being the leader. Keep the object hidden until it is your turn. The rest of the group members close their eyes while the leader brings this object to everyone and asks them to smell deeply. Each person immediately writes the images and associations that smell evoked. Share these writings with each other and see how similarly or differently you reacted to the same odor.

Taste

1.   Try to remember the first meal you consciously tasted and enjoyed. Describe this meal in detail; make yourself hungry with these details. Who ate this meal with you? If you can’t remember any such meal, imagine one.

2.   If you were to write a life history through food, what would be the “touchstone” moments, the meals that represented turning points for you? Which meals have you loved? Which meals have you hated? Which meals marked important transitions in your life?

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: Have “food exploration” days set aside for your group meetings. On these days, one person is responsible for bringing in an item of food for everyone to taste. After exploring the sight, textures, and smells, taste it. Describe this food in detail, then go on to whichever images and metaphorical associations arise.

Touch

1.   Take an inventory of the scars or marks on your body. How were they received? How do these external scars relate to any internal “markings” as well?

2.   Find an object that you consider a talisman, something you either carry with you or keep in a special place in your home. Hold it in your hand, and with your eyes closed, feel all its textures. Begin to write, using this tactile description to trigger memories, scenes, and metaphors.

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: Each person brings in such an object for a “show-and-tell,” explaining the story behind the item. Pass these things around the room for everyone to examine, and then write based on someone else’s talisman. What did it feel like in your hand? How does it trigger memories of your own?

Hearing

1.   Try creating a scene from your childhood using only the sense of hearing. What music is playing in the background? Whose voice is on the radio? How loud is the sound of traffic? Try to pick out as many ambient sounds as you can, then begin to amplify the ones you think have the most metaphorical significance. What kind of emotional tone do these sounds give to the piece?

2.   Put on a piece of music that you strongly associate with a certain era of your life. Using this music as a soundtrack, zero in on a particular scene that arises in your mind. Try writing the scene without mentioning the music at all, but through your word choices and imagery and sentence structure convey the essence of this music’s rhythm and beat.

VARIATION: Do the same thing, but this time use fragments of the lyrics as “scaffolding” for the essay. Give us a few lines, then write part of the memory those lines evoke in you. Give us a few more and continue with the memory, so that the song plays throughout the entire piece.

Sight

1.   Using a photograph of yourself, a relative, or a friend, describe every detail of the scene. Then focus on one object or detail that seems unexpected to you in some way. How does this detail trigger specific memories? Also, imagine what occurred just before and just after this photograph was taken; what is left outside the frame? For instance, write an essay with a title such as “After [Before] My Father Is Photographed on the U.S.S. Constitution.” (Insert whichever subject is appropriate for the photographs you’ve chosen.)

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: Repeat the preceding exercise, but then trade photographs with your neighbor. Which details strike you? How does any part of the scene remind you of scenes from your own life? Perform a number of these trades around the room to see which details leap up from other people’s photographs.

2.   Look at a memory piece you’ve already written. What kind of sight distances do you use? Extended view? Close up? Try revising this scene (or create a new one) using various sight distances.

Sixth Sense

1.   Go back to a scene you’ve already written and see if you can use language that heightens the sixth sense. Words such as “I don’t yet know . . . ,” or “perhaps . . . ,” or “I don’t know why . . . ,” can signal that you are entering territory beyond the physical facts of the moment.

BODY IMAGE

1.   Has body image been an issue in your life? Try to pinpoint early memories that speak to a “before and after” with this topic. When did you feel at ease with your body? When did that change? As with any early memory writing, use both fact and imagination to populate these scenes with concrete, sensory detail.

2.   Using the example from Suzanne Rivecca’s essay “People Are Starving” as a model, write your experience of body image in the first-person plural (“we”) point of view.

3.   Take a concept from Roxane Gay, and write a memoir piece from the point of view of your body.

ILLNESS MEMOIR

1.   Call up a memory of a time when you were ill: either an ongoing chronic illness or a momentary one. Focus your attention on the objects that surrounded you during that time. Give your reader a full picture of your environment, and allow the concrete things of this environment to lead you to new memories, new ideas, new understanding.

For example, in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey turns her attention on a tiny snail she finds in a pot of wild violets a friend brings her as she recuperates from a serious illness. We never find out much about the illness itself; rather, that time in bed, with only a wild snail for company, provides the author with a space to examine how one’s world shrinks in times of vulnerability and isolation.

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

•   “The Fine Art of Sighing” by Bernard Cooper

•   “Of Smells” by Michel de Montaigne

•   “Perdition” by Kristen Radtke

•   “First” by Ryan Van Meter

Resources Available Online

•   “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion

•   “People Are Starving” by Suzanne Rivecca

•   “Buckeye” by Scott Russell Sanders

Print Resources

•   The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

•   The Business of Memory, edited by Charles Baxter

•   The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

•   Truth Serum: Memoirs by Bernard Cooper

•   Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

•   River Teeth by David James Duncan

•   The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher

•   Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

•   Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System by Sonya Huber

•   The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

•   “Needlepoint” by Brenda Miller in Season of the Body

•   The Names by N. Scott Momaday

•   I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell

•   Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

•   House Built on Ashes by José Antonio Rodríguez

•   Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White

•   Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf