Memory and Memoirists Part III: Memory Made Real

If you’re writing a memoir, you’re working with memory.

But what is memory? Humans have used every possible discipline—from philosophy to computer science—to answer this question, and we can use that work to understand better how to use memory when we write. 

In Part I, I talked about Aristotle. In Part II, neuroscience. 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.” Given how vivid these memories are, she asks if “things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?” Surely if we could somehow access these moments, we could “live our lives through from the start” (77-8).

What a compelling idea. When writing memoir, you may at times feel like you have found that independent existence of your past—that you are reliving your life. This experience can be wonderful when the memory is a good one, and challenging when it is a painful one. But even more than making the memory real for yourself, you want to allow the reader to inhabit it. When Woolf describes her memories, she uses specific physical and emotional details that make them as vivid to the reader as they are to her. She passes on to us the intensity she feels. That’s your aim, too: to use language that enables your reader to re-live your life—for that “existence independent of our minds” to appear on the page.  

The memoirists Carmen Maria Machado and Kiese Laymon also talk about memory as having an existence outside of their minds: they describe how it lives in their bodies. This embodiment goes beyond the way a scent or song can evoke a memory; these writers are documenting the way their physical selves have responded to and still carry their life experiences.

In In the Dream House, Machado explains how her body contains the emotional and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her ex-girlfriend. A key component of that experience was her abuser denying Machado’s experience, but in the memoir Machado reclaims her experience using a multitude of strategies.

In the section “Dream House as Proof,” she asserts that her organs, her very cells, contain her story: “… my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex, with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do. They can still climb onto the witness stand. My memory has something to say about the way trauma has altered my body's DNA, like an ancient virus” (225). By locating memory in the tangible, concrete, and intimate space of her body, Machado combats the elusiveness and abstraction of memory. The certainty of her body conquers her abuser’s attempts to commandeer the narrative.

Laymon, in his memoir Heavy, also depicts memory as embodied and therefore undeniable. His story charts the ways in which his body has stored the psychic damage of family secrets, racism, and other lifetime struggles. At the end of his narrative, he reaches a transition point, ready to acknowledge and release the pain.

He can read his memories on his body, and he is ready to share that story: “I will show Grandmama my first stretch mark and talk to her about how it's changed in thirty years. I will show her these six scratches on my right wrist from years of trying to dunk. I will show her a blotched scar underneath my right eye. I pull my bottom lip down and show her scar tissue from a fall” (237). His body is as marked with his past as the page is with his words.   

Both Machado and Laymon’s versions of embodied memory should remind you that you have the authority to write about your own life. Your body’s experiences are unique, and your story is uniquely yours. You are the best narrator of your body’s sensations and movements, and you are the best narrator of how you have experienced your life.

Conceptualizing memory as embodied also helps us navigate the idea that memories are fluid, affected by the very act of recollection. Our bodies change every second but they are still real, our understanding of them still valid. Our memories too, as they exist in us, are also valid.

Machado, Carmen Maria. “Dream House as Proof.” In the Dream House: A Memoir. Graywolf Press. Minneapolis, MN: 2019.

Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir. Scribner: New York. 2018.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. Triad Grafton: London. 1976.