Not quite funny-haha, more like funny-life affirming
"Every moment of every day, this mass of electrified meat in my skull grows and shrinks."
One of the funny things about being 43, because there are oh so many funny things about being 43 (not quite funny-haha, more like funny-hmmm wouldja look at that), is how my functional memory has shifted.
I have never felt more on top of the little stuff, the tiny stuff. I am 100 times better now than I was 10 or even 20 years ago at remembering the 14+ random things I need to have with me before exiting the house any given time of any given day. The tights for the kid’s theater show. The left-behind cleat for the soccer game. The water bottle. The dog leash. The snacks. The sunscreen. The wine key. The hip flask.
If I need to bring more insulin syringes to my mom’s house, more Q-tips, more dishwasher detergent, I do. If someone texts me in the morning to grab their hoodie and bring it to the swimming pool that night, I remember. Far better than I used to.
But, in this same vast and hardworking mind of mine, huge swaths of my memory seem to have vanished.
I was at dinner the other night with a friend who just had her second baby. Over glasses of picpoul and a simmering crock of gambas al ajillo, she went on about sleep regression and bottle refusal and those little motorized suckers you use to suction snot from stuffy infant nostrils, and, as she spoke, these long-dark corners of my brain suddenly glimmered, briefly and faintly, with shards of light.
I have, 9 and 13 years ago, dealt with almost all of those things. I think. And then I’ve summarily forgotten them. Buried them, perhaps, or maybe overwritten them with recipes for kid-friendly musubi, Novolog dosing schedules, the subtle differences between the AP Stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style. Whatever it is, those memories are faded and blurry — to the point where I wonder if they really are my memories, or if they’re images conjured by my mind in order to deepen my empathy for this friend who is in the thick of it with her two young kids.
Maybe my mind understood, after the second and third IUDs, that I would never, ever, ever need that information again. Or maybe my mind knew that I didn’t quite experience the exact things this friend was fretting over, but I did experience really similar things — and look here’s what those things may have, kind of, looked like!
Who knows?
For a writer whose debut memoir comes out in 123 days (that’s fortunate timing), such potential lapses of my brain might be of concern. But for me, this shift in functional memory, this change of perspective — that is what memoir is about. That is the beating heart of this format.
Memoir is not autobiography. It is not a strict, blow-by-blow reenactment of events. Memoir is one person’s perspective tinted, shaded and hopefully enlarged by days and years and decades of perspective. It is snippets of life as filtered through one person’s mind and that mind’s quirky machinations, its lived experiences, and its ability to process those experiences and layer them atop one another in ways that allow the body to keep going.
Some of my absolute favorite memoirs do this, this layering, this filtering, this perspective shifting, so brilliantly it feels effortless. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, for example. Inside the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Monsoon Mansion by Cinelle Barnes. These books are not snapshots of situations. They aren’t retellings of life events. They are processings and constructions, searches for truth, honesty, meaning in sentence after sentence, page after page.
One of the funny things about writing a memoir, because there are oh so many funny things about writing a memoir (not quite funny-haha, more like funny-wtf am I actually doing?) is that, if given a clean slate, I could take the same set of experiences that informed The Mango Tree and write an entirely new memoir next year. And the year after. And the year after.
Every moment of every day, this mass of electrified meat in my skull grows and shrinks. Collects and discards. Learns and unlearns. It is constantly changing. I am constantly changing.
Perhaps the funniest thing about being 43 (not quite funny-haha, more like funny-wonderful) is my ability to see these changes for what they are. Growth. And to not just accept them but embrace them.
One of your best. Loved it.
AT...you write, "I could take the same set of experiences that informed The Mango Tree and write an entirely new memoir next year. And the year after. And the year after." Is that because the meaning of those experiences will change or that your memory of them will change? When can you trust your memory? (Always?). What's your view of using dialogue in memoir?