Danielle Trussoni
AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF MY MEMOIR, THE QUESTION readers most frequently asked was, How did you remember your life so vividly? Human memory is a mystery, one that every writer—whether a poet or a fiction or nonfiction writer—grapples with. The question of memory, and how it is that we sometimes remember one situation in precise, perfectly ordered detail but cannot remember other events or circumstances, is a great puzzle.
The simple answer is: everyone remembers differently. Some people have photographic memories and can look at a page once and recite its words without the slightest mnemonic prop, yet have no ability to remember music or speech patterns or the details of people's lives. Still other writers have an uncanny ability to retain narrative—tell them a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and he or she will remember it forever.
So much of what I recall has to do with my state of mind, even my chemistry. When I was pregnant, my body pumped up with hormones, I could feel my ability to remember change by the month. In the first trimester, I began to recollect the smallest details of my childhood, down to the exact pattern of a tablecloth at a diner where I used to eat pancakes with my dad and the sandals he wore while mowing the lawn (rubber-soled, with thick straps of rawhide leather crisscrossing at the vamp). Then, in the second trimester, my memory softened and I could hardly recall my own name. As my chemicals changed, so did my memory.
One way to capture the slippery details necessary to write a striking piece of personal narrative is to attempt to nail down specific moments in time. There are tricks or techniques that will help the writer do this. One device I used in writing my memoir is something I call a “memory map.” Like a road map to the past, a memory map guides the mind to the essential emotional truth of a scene by isolating details the writer may have forgotten.
For example, when I decided to write a scene about being in my father's favorite bar, a place called Roscoe's Vogue Bar in my home-town of La Crosse, Wisconsin, I knew that there was a lot of distance between the adult who was writing the scene and the child who had lived it. Of course, I had been inside the bar hundreds of times as a child, but I felt that parts of the experience of being in Roscoe's remained hazy.
My first step was to draw a representation of Roscoe's on a piece of paper, physically mapping it. I sketched in the wraparound bar, the jukebox, the bathrooms, the back door, the alley, everything I could recall about the physical layout of the place. This helped to bring my memory back to the physical space I was trying to inhabit in my mind, the setting of the scene. I then used different colored pens to write, in the various locations on the paper—that is, the bathrooms and the back room and the entrance—all of the details I could recall. For example, the bathrooms had carved wooden pig placards on the doors, bright pink with blue lettering that read, “Ladies and Gents.” I wrote these details on the memory map. The back room of the bar had softball trophies and dartboards. There were taxidermy animals on a wall near the jukebox. The bar top was glossy and marbled with a tortoiseshell veneer. Next, on one side of the page, I made a list of sensory adjectives that described Roscoe's: smoky, dark, crowded, loud, hot, and so on. Once I'd divided up the space and made a mental journey though it, the details of Roscoe's came back with startling clarity.
Getting the physical characteristics of a scene into your mind is the first step to creating a vivid and engaging scene from your life. Revivifying and effectively conveying the emotional nexus of an experience, however, is often even more difficult to do. After writing a scene, I will sometimes go back to my memory map and try to get at this final (and more elusive) aspect by adding sensory experiences to the mix. For instance, I made a list of all the songs I'd heard played on the jukebox at Roscoe's and downloaded them onto my iPod, listening to them as I worked on the scene. I rented movies from the time period I was writing about (1984) and watched them to get a more intuitive feel for the mood of the era, the clothes, idioms, cultural concerns. I call this doing an “emotional wash” over the map. I've found that this final step in mapping an event from the past helps bring an emotional intensity to the writing that may not have been there before.
Choose a scene or an event from your life that you would like to write about.
Isolate the main physical space where the scene (or the event) will be set and draw a map of the space on a piece of paper. Be sure to mark out all of the rooms and surrounding areas. Write down the characteristics and details you recall from each room. Note which people may or may not enter the scene. Be very specific.
List adjectives that capture the texture of the time and place.
Do an “emotional wash” over the map. Use music, photographs, movies of the period, diaries, taped conversations, anything that will give you the flavor of the real, lived experience of the event. Allow these sensory experiences to bring you back to the past. Write these memories, however fragmented, down on the map.