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.”

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.