Memory never goes out of style. From as far back as The Tale of Genji—arguably the first novel—where Emperor Suzaku is haunted by dreams of his late father, writers have been obsessed with memory as a theme, plot device, and conundrum to be parsed, interrogated, and exploited.
The Remains of the Day, The Giver, The Memory Police, In Search of Lost Time, The Sense of an Ending. The last of these belongs to that ever-expanding, What Has My Life Become genre—every male novelist apparently gets a ticket to write at least one—(Colorless Tsukuri Tazaki; Rabbit, Run; The Ask). Then there’s the Trip Through Time novel, where a character revisits the childhood home (The Turner House; This is Where I Leave You; Goodbye, Vitamin), the Piecing Together the Past novel (Austerlitz; Biography of X; An Inventory of Losses), and then there are any number of novels where the main character is simply plagued by memory or burdened with grief (Western Lane; So Late in the Day; Crime and Punishment).
William Zinsser says, “Writers are the custodians of memory” in his classic On Writing Well. This obsession with filing away the past is rife with trouble—we misremember, we exaggerate, we forget, we willfully ignore, we blame—because it forces confrontation. As Mary Karr says in The Art of Memoir, “Everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.”
I suppose you could say every memoir is a book of memory—more how than what it remembers, and how the author seduces that how into dramatization— and Joe Brainard’s I Remember is no exception. I Remember launched a thousand writing prompts. Natalie Goldberg uses it in Writing Down the Bones. Robert Olen Butler has his students, in From Where You Dream, write their most intense memories in scene form. Anne Lamott implores the young writer to see what they remember about school lunches in Bird by Bird. I Remember, however, stitches together a lifetime of prompts and is comprised of small sections that begin with that eponymous phrase. Memories run the gamut, from the girl in grade school who had “skinny legs that were cracked like a Chinese vase” to “trying not to look lonely in restaurants alone.” Brainard charts his quaint, childhood years in Oklahoma to his künstlerroman years in New York, from burgeoning sexual fantasies to meditations on race and class, from trying to seduce Frank O’Hara to cheating at solitaire. Odd sensations—sense memories—like the squeak of rubber or the unappetizing look of pumpkin pie, create a delightful recognition, a “Yes, I’ve always thought that.” He eventually folds into the New York School of poets, while also establishing himself as a visual artist. Brainard purportedly wrote ten times as many “I remembers” than appear in the book, so the fascination lies in the construction of the whole, the movement, and what he chooses to include just as much as what he chooses to omit. This outstanding lyric poem of New York in the ‘60s catalogues the minutia without submitting to tedium.
Memory takes on a different task in Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, where she sifts through twenty-five years of compulsive, daily diary entries to get to the bottom of, well, her compulsive diary entries. She calls her habit a “vice,” and says, “I’d sooner go unbathed than skip a day of writing” and cops to the underlying anxiety: “Experience itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.” The entire book is 95 pages, and there is a lot of blank space, which is itself a comment on the million words she’s collected over the years. She refuses to quote from the diary, instead trying to understand the experiment as a whole just as she confronts her own impermanence. The writing is aphoristic at times (“To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.”) and other times existential (“A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word—soon it will all be gone.”) and full of sharp observations of motherhood’s effects on the brain (“Nursing an infant creates so much lost, empty time.”).
Manguso is quickly becoming one of my favorite contemporary writers. She cuts straight to the bone, eschews the writerly flourishes of piling on metaphor or indulging in lyrical description. Her profundity is in the plainspoken. Reading Ongoingness, I kept thinking of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, the naked consciousness grasping in the void, and I felt a little vulnerable, like she’d pegged me, exposed me, found me out as I obsessively jot down thoughts, ideas, and experiences, “dancing my little dance for a few moments agains the background of eternity.”
If Manguso sees memory as an unreliable narrator, and Brainard as a time capsule, William Brewer sees it as something that folds, bends, and twists. Upon first inspection, The Red Arrow sounds like a rip-off of The Nix: promising young writer spends all his book advance money and flounders as he tries to deliver the novel for which he’s under contract. He doesn’t deliver, and instead is barely let off the hook by promising to deliver a memoir. This memoir, however, unlike The Nix, comes to him from a world-renowned Italian physicist who plucked him to ghostwrite his memoir (the physicist liked narrator’s first book, a collection of stories based around a childhood Boy Scouts incident). Most of the “present action” unfolds on a train ride. The narrator and his wife are on their honeymoon in Italy, and he takes a train to Modena to track down the physicist, who has gone missing. The fun part, though, is how slyly Brewer layers the story. Most of the novel is flashback. We get the narrator’s early days as a bumbling painter, how he meets his wife, how he accidentally writes his first book, how he’s always struggled with “The Mist” (his name for depression), his troubled relationship with his father, his childhood trauma of living through the Great Monongahela River Chemical Spill of 1996 (stain on consciousness, stain of depression, shadow of trauma, etc.), and how he eventually stumbles upon Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and hires a guide to help him with psychedelic therapy. The narrator’s bookishness gets a little tiring and convenient, a substitute for making meaning rather than actually making meaning, but the layering of time and the writing both feel fresh and exciting. In sum: Trip through time, excavating the past, confronting the past, which very sharply impinges upon the present, man seeking a man who might’ve disappeared who is a capsule for the past, which will ostensibly free the present. This feels like a book only a writer who’s read a lot could write. (Brewer is a poet, so the sentences are worthy of angelic harmonies.) The physicist’s memories bleed into narrator’s, and he has trouble differentiating the two. Trains speed through the Italian countryside. Scenes from the past slowly unravel.
While Brainard tries to catch and conserve memories, Manguso wants to understand the nature of the catch. Brewer, meanwhile, wants to make memories into phyllo dough. In the world of these writers, it seems, as David Suzuki says, “The future doesn’t exist.”
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