Fictional Memories
Stories we tell about forgetting
I wasn’t planning on doing a second season of The Memory Hole Podcast.
It's just me here after all, creating, writing and producing this podcast, and Season 1, where I explored the psychological scandal of the recovered memory movement, was a lot of work. After I cleared my desk of my ‘high tech’ set up and reacquainted myself with my writing projects, I thought I was done with podcasting.
Listen to Season 1 of The Memory Hole Podcast.
Several listeners had written in with suggestions proposing I look at other events swept under the historical rug, like the MKUltra scandal or lobotomies. I think this is the expected direction for a podcast that ‘debunks’ a topic - move on and debunk another hysteria. The themes are similar and lots of the same dynamics play out in all hysterias.
But I wasn’t so interested in those topics. Because when it comes right down to it, I’m still thinking about memory. How memory is understood in our popular culture still bears additional debunking, so to speak. At the root. Which is what season 2 is about.
As I continued my research to support my novel, I kept noticing in particular how wrong the common/popular conception of memory is. Why does repression persist as the default explanation for trauma, when research psychologists have discovered a lot more about how memory works? Long after the recovered memory disproved these ideas, why haven’t people let go of the belief that psychologically damaging events are forgotten in a self-protective mechanism?
I believe it is because the stories we tell and are told are usually wrong about memory.
Memory loss makes a great, nearly irresistible plot device. Because of this, amnesia is common in fiction, but rare in life. Some stories directly use stories of repression and memory recovery to drive the story forward. There is amnesia from head trauma, amnesia from alcohol-induced blackouts and the ever-present amnesia after something terrible happened - aka a repressed memory that resurfaces in time to save the protagonist.
Aside from relying on inaccurate depictions of memory and forgetting, even telling a story can alter how we understand memory. Stories themselves mimic the mental process of a memory - this happened, then that and then that. But there are differences in how we experience the world and what we read about. Some literary theorists even argue that the way fiction presents memory is inaccurate to the lived experience. Analepsis, also known as a literary flashback, is a great example of this sort of fictional presentation. When the chronological story is interrupted with events and scenes from an earlier occurrence, often it bridges the gap between a specific past event and the starting point of the protagonist’s own memory. This is usually used to portray the psychological development of a character, whose memories fall into place in a meaningful life narrative - which presupposes that we can create a coherent construction of the past.
The stories we are told and the stories we as writers tell our readers distort the way memory really works. And those sorts of inaccuracies bother me. I’m not an expert in this area - I wasn’t even an English major - but my outsider perspective offers me some freedom. And I hope ultimately that my inquiries might provoke other questions in listeners.
A note about memoir writing - after all it is the most popular genre. Everyone has their story to tell. Memoir writing is the one area of writing instruction that specifically addresses memory and its shortcomings. I’ll explore how memoirists reconstruct (a version of) their past, and revisit the master himself -- Marcel Proust.
I can already imagine the counter arguments to my premise - of course novelists are not scientists so of course we should not hold them to standards of accuracy - you’re talking about fiction! Maybe I’ve made these sorts of arguments myself - fiction provides nuance after all.
But the stories we are told and then in turn tell other people are what make up a lot of reality. In saying this I am asserting the importance of storytelling - it has a powerful effect on our understanding of ourselves, others and the world. Reading fiction can increase our empathy for others. Fiction is a model for our own self-narration and interpretation of the past. My critique is a testimony to the power of stories in our lives.
I developed a second season of The Memory Hole Podcast to explore these ideas around how memory is distorted in fiction, and what that means for us as readers. I wanted to explore these questions because I love both creating and escaping to an imaginary world as an aspiring author and a life-long reader. But I want to be good at what I do and smart about how I do it. By raising these questions around memory, forgetting, and fiction, I hope to do just that.
Listen to the trailer for Season 2 here.
Bibliography
Jonathan Lethem’s Vintage Book of Amnesia
Black Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlich
Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way) Marcel Proust
The Deepest Lake by Andromeda Romano-Lax (Andromeda’s website)
You Must Remember This by Kat Rosenfield
Present Tense Substack by Andromeda Romano-Lax
Book/Movies Mentioned:
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson
I'd love to talk with you sometime about memory and memoir. I've noticed some things during my writing process.