In this final installment, I want to look at how three memoirists have conceived of memory.

One of my favorite memoirs is Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Sketch of the Past.” In the opening pages, she describes her earliest memories and says that they “can … be more real than the present moment.”

In Part I, I talked about Aristotle. Now let’s jump ahead a couple thousand years or so to the present and think about how neuroscience understands memory and what that means for memoirists.

If you are writing a memoir, you are working with memory.

But what is memory? Humans have used every possible discipline—philosophy, literature, psychology, biology, film, computer science—to explore this question, and we can use their work to understand better how we can use memory when we write.

These ideas go beyond the basics (like using vivid language and being honest) to help you improve your memory and your writing.

For writing (and any creative endeavor), binaries often harm rather than assist our understanding.

I used to have a colleague who often asked me if I’d read a certain book in our field. If I had, she’d make a quick comment and move on. But if I hadn’t, she’d drop open her mouth, widen her eyes, and exclaim, “You haven’t? But it’s amazing! It’s totally changed what I do!”

Sometimes I’m at my best when I don’t know what I’m doing.