What the Science of Memory Can (and Can’t) Reveal about Truth in Memoir

On a cold, clear evening in February 2002, on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation where my mother had been raised, my brother and cousin were tracked by the FBI. Looking at FBI photos meant to incriminate my brother changed me, and eventually changed my writing.

After many years of publishing poetry, I started turning to prose: writing at a slant no longer seemed to address what needed saying. I had intended to write about family, land, race and addiction on the prairies of South Dakota, but as I tried to trace my brother’s story, I kept stumbling onto broken, forgotten fragments of my own life, and realized that the book I was writing needed to also be about that unfolding ulterior narrative of mine, as well as about the stakes we can have in forgetting, and memory’s ways of adjusting our inner stories.

I read and re-read many memoirs, looking not just for recountings of lives, but for this sense of memory’s disjunctures and changes over time. One memoir I went back to was Lucy Grealy’s 1994 Autobiography of a Face, whose many angles on remembering illuminate the complicated operations of recollection.

While Grealy’s book recalls a traumatic sequence of surgeries throughout her childhood to remove a large cancerous part of her jaw, and then the many surgical efforts at reconstructing her face, the power of the book lies in the psychological struggle all of this involved, and in deciphering the intricacies of memory’s overlays. One passage zooms in on Lucy’s recalling a job she had at age fourteen—helping to bring ponies to children’s birthday parties—and how her pleasure in the job was marred by anxiety that her face could startle the children.

When, by chance, years later, she sees her face in the background of one of the party photographs, her writing shifts verb tense and gives the reader, in the present, her experience of looking at the picture: “I’m holding on to a small dark bay pony whose name I don’t remember. I look frail and thin and certainly peculiar, but I don’t look anywhere near as repulsive as I then believed I did.”

She returns the reader then, through looking at the photograph, to the earlier present physical moment of a party going on around her, and then, through sounds and smells of the horse trailer, carries forward in time again to the present tense of holding the snapshot, and pondering how “we go about turning into the people we are meant to be.”

Sven Birkerts, in his 2008 book The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, studies these pages of Grealy’s with the precision of a scientist, delineating her “shifting unobtrusively from fantasy, to straight description, to hindsight interpretation, to pure sensory memory, to reflective questioning, thus giving her reader an advance indication of the complexity that lies in store.”

Birkerts, a memoirist himself, clarifies Grealy’s journey from anticipation of having her face restored, to the recognition that her “liberation” is to be something much more interior, and he also addresses the reader’s experience of this awareness: “Being witness in this way to the self’s encounter with its assumptions and illusions, the private reckoning given literary form, is one of the deep rewards of reading memoir.”

Many elements of Sven Birkerts’ argument for the importance of memoir, and the ways memory works in memoir, are implicitly echoed in a new book, Why We Remember (Doubleday 2024), by Charan Ranganath, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California Davis.

Ranganath examines the history and current scientific study of memory and of forgetting: how these ongoing processes take place in the mind and affect nearly everything we do privately as well as in our wider lives. As he discusses both the interior and the social aspects of remembering, Ranganath notes that nearly half of people’s conversations involve telling stories and recounting memories.

Though his book is not a memoir, it employs some elements of memoir: he knows that the use of a distinct voice, and memories of his own, will help carry his reader through the technical information he lays out for us. He lets us know his individual self as a guide, and as he explains experiments and findings that demonstrate how our minds absorb the things we have been through, he often takes us into his life to offer examples, like the disastrous paddleboarding excursion with a colleague that, in their later recalling it together, led to further discovery about how sharing stories can afford new perspectives on memory.

According to Ranganath, our memories are constantly changing in subtle ways: “When we remember, we do not passively replay the past. Accessing a memory is more like pressing ‘play’ and ‘record’ at the same time.” As we revisit the past in our minds, we have further information from the present that can adjust our sense of that past.

But he pushes back against those who might make too much of this fact: “Media articles on the malleability of memory often extrapolate wildly from studies of memory updating, suggesting we can never trust anyone’s recollection of events that took place long ago.” This kind of claim is dangerous, he says, especially regarding traumatic memory, and is “inconsistent with the science.”

Most experimental psychologists, he affirms, “would agree that people can accurately recall many aspects of traumatic events, and that memory updating rarely leads people to form completely new memories for extreme or traumatic events.” He also explains that because of the pain of recalling trauma, it’s understandable that many survivors unknowingly work to keep the memories “out of mind.”

But not having thought about a traumatic experience for a long time, and even forgetting that it had been remembered in the past, doesn’t mean it’s not there. “Later on, being in a particular context or situation, as when we revisit a location where a trauma occurred, might remind us of an incident that we had otherwise forgotten,” he says.

This was what I experienced when looking at pictures that had been given to my brother’s lawyer by the Federal prosecutor. My brother had been charged with distribution of meth and conspiracy, and was awaiting sentencing that could lead to anywhere from five to twenty years in prison, depending on which charges would stick. Wanting my thoughts about the Discovery photographs of places he said he’d never been, my brother asked me to look through those photos in his office of the family farmhouse he then ran.

That house had been built on the former site of my grandparents’ old homestead house, and as I stared at the scenes of meth labs—dark junky sheds, rooms in grimy trailers with their windows covered, basements snarled with tubes and bottles and buckets and canisters—I began to shiver, recalling the dank, dirt basement of the older farmhouse that had once sat in the same location as the house I was in: the jumbled cellar scattered with jars and cans and hoses and machine parts, a place I’d been led down to late, on nights when I was small and stayed with my grandparents and my uncle who lived with them.

I’d frozen the memory of my uncle’s making me stay quiet in the mud-smelly dark, his telling me to tell no one about going to the cellar—had frozen and kept what he did to me there “out of mind,” as Ranganath puts it. Those snapshots that had nothing to do with me brought back a terror I’d separated from myself.

My hands on my brother’s desk shook, as if the chair under me was suspended over the murky, messy cellar that was no longer there. My brother’s trouble had brought up from the dark a trouble of my own that I’d long ago hidden, even from myself.

I began to understand that my brother’s private difficulties and mine were more intertwined than I’d known, that I needed to investigate the origins of our different efforts at trying to lose parts of ourselves. Sven Birkerts shows that memoirs of early trauma, while they search for hidden patterns between present and past, often cannot be relayed with a clear sense of narrative: “Rather than assuming continuity, they must, at the deepest level, reflect and somehow compensate for its destruction.”

This describes how we follow books like Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Richard Hoffman’s Half the House, memoirs of self-inquiry whose precise details and uniqueness of voice bring back to life stories that had been buried—stories of a mother’s murder, of childhood emotional and physical abuse, of family violence and loss shrouding a boy’s sexual exploitation by his grade-school football coach. Birkerts helped me recognize how trusting language can allow not only the uncovering of such memories from the realm of confusion and denial, but can change the teller’s relationship to self.

Any memoirist must make choices about which material to include and which not to, in order to distinguish a book’s voice and give shape to the story. Likewise, any scientific study of memory will select limited (usually fairly arbitrary) experiences to examine in many subjects, in order to arrive at general conclusions.

We need both personal voices and objective inquiry to achieve a deeper understanding of remembering. Ongoing scientific exploration can allow us to know how our senses of who we have been and are now were formed, just as individual stories of recollection can help us feel the real-ness of being a self, and the ways self develops and alters over time.

If, as Charan Ranganath says, memory is always subtly changing as our experience changes, memoir can show us particularly how this happens, through writing that reveals in specific lives the interacting of present and past.