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.

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