Rummaging through storage, you come across a single roller skate. And find yourself staring, following it into that space where its broken mate and long-lost key still exist; find yourself standing motionless except for the finger flick that absently spins one of the pitted wheels. Around you, a sense of speed is reconstructing itselfâsubtle adjustments of balance, sting of wind-rush in your eyes, the peripheral blur of cityscape passing, one particular gold-leafed October afternoon, an entire autumnal season.

Memory, the original virtual reality, operates doubly like a hologram or a synecdoche: it's vividly unreal, and the enlargeable whole is nested in each of its fragments.

A memory is the cousin of a dream.

2
.

Memories have nothing to do with fact.

When the content of a memory can be collectively agreed upon by a
sufficient number of peopleâor by a few people with the power to encode their version of realityâthe memory gets passed on, in a kind of Darwinian selection, until it acquires the patina of history. But time and successive waves of interpretation scar the surface and erode the substance. As details gradually crumble, the bestâsometimes the onlyâfixative is invention, however much that might be denied by those who care more about facts than about truths.

Memory is the reason rhyme was conceived, writing was invented, painting, sculpture, musical scoring, and choreographic labanotation were devised. The great library at Alexandria was a skull housing the memories of the ancient world, lost forever to Caesar's flames.

Memory is why writers, artists, and musicians create.

Vintage memory always mellows into fiction. Even into myth.

3
.

Lavender, a ghostly fragrance even when fresh, rubbed on the wrists of a dying aunt. A lover's way of frowning. The message, even if you can't understand the words, in a voice dropping to a whisper. The features of a lost, dreamt, parent's face. Taffeta's slink against an ankle. The stored taste that distinguishes an orange from a tangerine from a grapefruit.

Memory moves as a process of accumulation, shards of experience floating toward each other along mysterious currents beyond their control, then lodging together the way a reef amasses itself from living coral bodies and dead coral corpses. (There's that memory you're alone with, that moment only you remember. â¦) At the same time, memory moves in a process of increasing
dis
orderâof entropy, as our individual recollections, along with our individual consciousnesses, flicker, flare brilliantly, then wink out and vanish into the black holes of a universe indifferent as any Alzheimer's-sequined brain resembling it. (There's that anecdote in someone else's summary of you, your whole life encapsulated into a moment you yourself have completely forgotten. â¦)

But alwaysâwhether rough or precise, partial or expansive, vivid or vague, acknowledged or deniedâmemory is art.

It may be good art or bad art; it may even be kitsch. But art it is, the remembered subject having been elevated to a prominence beyond mere artifice not by ethical virtue and not always with craft, but simply through choices decided in lateral leaps by the unconscious.

The question is: how to make it good art?

4
.

I dreamed I kicked the door shut behind me, dropped my keys, shuffled the mail, and left it scattered across my desk. Then I hit the playback button and half listened to phone messages while drifting through the rooms like a sleepwalker, undressing, fixing a bite to eat. â¦ I can't remember at what point I flopped down across the bed, diagonally, only for a moment, just to stretch outâbut fell asleep and â¦ dreamed I sat at my desk, writing a recollection of having slept so realistically it might have been a form of waking: it had an almost discernible meaningâas if a key were turning in the lock, a door opening â¦

So I kicked the door shut behind me, dropped my keys, shuffled the mail, and left it scattered across my desk. â¦

5
.

“Paths delude us into thinking we're not lost.”

I wrote that years ago, and thought it was a pretty good line. Now I think it was a touching sign of youth that I imagined I saw paths at all.

Now I know that any honest writer has to acknowledge wandering the terrain of a memoir like an archaeologist in Laos roaming the Plain of Jars, able only to speculate about what really took place: whether this was a burying ground, a religious-ritual site, a storage area; why one stone jar is ten feet tall and others tiny enough to be held in one palm, why there are hundreds of jars, empty jars, broken jars, perfectly intact jars, jars filled with centuries-old silt, and jars filled with recent as-yet-unevaporated rain.

There are differing theories, but the real story eludes everyone.

So it's no use asking, because there's no one to answer.

6
.

Maybe it's better to think of memory as a garden, a work simultaneously in progress and in retrospect. I like this metaphor, since I came late but passionately to gardening. Then again, as garden writer Robin Chotzinoff has noticed, “There are no child prodigy gardeners,” and lateness is subjective. When I was in my existentialist teens, the phrase “Dirty Hands” meant to me not soiled fingers but the Jean-Paul Sartre play by that title. Though I still love the play, today its title first brings to mind weeding, deadheading, spreading compost, planting bulbs. Today I understand how memory, like a garden, has at least eight dimensions: width, length, height, depth, temperature, time, moisture/aridity, and chiaroscuroâthe play of light and shade. Furthermore, just because the gardener has planned and toiled for certain results is no guarantee things will grow that wayâwater, mulch, or fertilize as she will.

Gardens and memories are useful cures for hubris.

7
.

By the time anyone has earned enough years to write a memoir, aging has bestowed a bemusingly selective memory that seems to kick in (or rather out) starting around one's late forties. It's a mild disability, but one that nevertheless can escalate memoir writing into more of a Grail-quest challenge than it might be if one were young enough not to have had the experiences one is now old enough to share but not always recall.

As for objectivity, well really. How is that possible? Even quantum physicists no longer believe in the existence of objectivity. On the other hand, though memory lives along a slippery incline, there have to be some limits, at least some
traction
, to the slippage. If honesty means daring to trust the politics of the subjective, it also means admitting, in my case, a personal dread of sliding over the edge, damning myself to circles of Lillian Hellishmania.

Thank god memoir is by definition a reasonably subjective genreâunlike autobiography, which bolsters its pretense to objectivity by flaunting footnotes.

In essence, nothing is more subjective than memory.
¹

8
.

Bracing advice to Reluctant Memoirist (RM) self
:

“Look, dear. Friends, acquaintances, readers, strangers, and your publisher all seem to think you've led an unusually interesting life. You might think so too, if you hadn't been there every moment. You know how it looks: baby model/child actor/teen TV star, grows up to be a poet and marry another poet who's also a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, has a child by him and stays married for twenty years; a mother, a political activist for three decades, a feminist theorist, a novelist, playwright, journalist, editor, organizer, divorcee; and the lover of two different women in substantive physical and emotional relationships, all before turning fifty. What others think of your life is hilariously romantic, exotic, even perverse: Show-biz kid! TV's little sweetheart! Bloomsbury lifestyle bohemian! Drugs/sex/rock 'n' roll Sixties Yippie! Civil-rights worker, militant revolutionary, temporary terrorist! Jailbird! Passionate poet! Wild-eyed radical feminist! Broom-riding world traveler! Bra burner/radical mother/lesbian orgiast!”

Little do they know how tame and wholesome it's been.

Little do they know that, looking back, it all dissolves before what remains as the sole consistent reality: day after year after decade of hunching at various desks, trying to wrestle nouns toward precision, intensify verbs, and cut, cut, cut adjectives.

9
.

And trying to invoke the descent of exact metaphor as if it were graceâthat mysterious visitation for which you must always be in an attentive state of readiness, but which, no matter how you try (and try you must), you can never earn.

What is a sense memory, anyway, but a vivid metaphor?

The nap of that sapphire-blue crushed-velvet princess dress with satin frog buttons my five-year-old self loved soâwhich wound up being donated by my mother to the Franciscan priest who requested it.

The nervous, almost sexual tension of waiting, in full costume and makeup, for my entrance cue, standing behind the set: that smell â¦ plaster dust! That basketweave grey canvas backing of the painted brick “wall.” The chalky rub of white shoe-polish smears on my eight-year-old hands.

The warm scent of my mother's terrycloth bathrobe, a dark bronze cinnamon musk laced with faint almond and not-quite-turned cream.

They say the oldest sense is olfactory, lodged in the remaining corner of what was once our reptilian brain.

If so, perhaps a snake thinks in metaphor.

10
.

OK. No more procrastinating. Ways of organizing a memoir:

BOOK: Saturday's Child

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