According to the internet and conversations with family and friends, the general consensus I have gathered is that many people don’t begin writing memoirs until they are in their 70’s, or are in the later stages of life. Wow!

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Since I am in my 20s, I certainly have fewer experiences to write about than a person 10 or 20 years my senior, or less “plot” to go on. However, that also means the memories of my life’s events are more recent and fresher than those of older memoirists. But even I have trouble remembering experiences that took place many years ago.

Memories are the plot and storyline a theme can draw on. They are, after all, the core of memoir writing, necessary to weave together a story. However, many writers, young and old alike, experience the same worry with the memories they do have. They worry, whether due to aging or simply forgetting, that they cannot recall the correct details of the moments they need to write about.

I, too, worry about the fuzziness of my childhood memories and about having forgotten many of the specific details. I am currently in book inc’s Memoir Incubator, which involves deep diving into memories that shaped the person I am today. Last week, I was trying to write a scene about a birthday party I had at a roller skating rink, but I increasingly realized that I barely remember it all. I was mostly going off of what other people have told me about this party. When I rack my brain, I only see disjointed frames: one of my tan dress with a ribbon wrapped around the waist that made me feel grown up, one of the boys from my grade falling over each other on the wooden panels of the rink (this was the first party with more than just girls invited—a context clue!), and one of my mother’s smiling face, all the quality of one of those old film cameras. What even happened at the party besides roller skating? Were my cousins there? Where was my dad? Only remembering small details often turns me off from writing about fuzzy memories, because I feel like I can’t do the memory justice.

However, sometimes, just recounting the details that you do remember, no matter how few, can do a lot of work for the reader. For example, on page 77 of Dani Shapiro’s memoir Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, she recounts a memory she has from a dinner party:

“What I remember: a marvelous, fairy-tale house, the front parlor where we gathered for drinks before heading out to a bistro a few blocks away. A vodka martini with two olives in a long-stemmed glass.”

Even though she may not remember every single detail or even the conversations she had, she recounts the images she does remember, which helps the reader visualize what it was like. Additionally, here is another quote from page 26 involving a memory with Shapiro’s mother:

“’You knew your father,’ my mother went on. In my memory, she is looking directly at me. ‘Can you imagine such a thing?’”

This quote is powerful because by including “in my memory,” Shapiro acknowledges that she is unsure whether her mother was truly looking at her in that moment. But in Shapiro’s memory, that is what she sees, and that is what matters the most for the reader in order to understand the author’s experience.

Shapiro also often uses her imagination to create meaningful images for the reader in places she was not present, such as imagining what her parents were doing in the hospital when seeking help for conceiving her, or picturing her dad visiting his father’s grave even though she never went with him. Shapiro uses her imagination to set the scene for readers without relying on direct memory.

There are also ways that an author can use misremembering to their advantage by being truthful about their mistakes. This gives the reader the sense of listening to a narrator who is honest about what they have forgotten. An example from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (clearly one of my favorites if you have read my previous posts) appears below. She describes remembering lines from a poem. First, on page 40:

“I could not that morning remember who wrote these lines.”

And then, on the next page:

“It would be some months before I remembered to confirm that the lines were in fact E.E. Cummings.”

Here, Didion does a beautiful job of following her own train of thought and not immediately telling the reader who wrote those lines. Didion is being vulnerable, and uses misremembering to her advantage to draw the reader in.

Bringing it back to Inheritance, Shapiro actually directly addressed the issue of having poor memory on page 165:

“Sometimes people suggest that I must have an amazing memory—that surely I must recall so many scenes, moments, sensory details from my early years. But the truth is that I have a terrible memory. I struggled to access any of my childhood or even my teenage years. I had no recollection of it as a story. And so I followed my own line of words to see where it would lead me.”

As Shapiro said, at the end of the day, follow your “own line of words” and trust yourself! That being said, there are many ways you can use misremembering and imagination to strengthen your work instead of being afraid to write about certain memories at all. Your reader can smell fear! You won’t know until you try, so I challenge you to write about your fuzzy memories and see what happens. (I’m giving the roller skating party another shot!)

About the Author

Emma Moriarty is a recent Lehigh University graduate and award-winning writer from Shrewsbury, NJ, who works at Blood Cancer United and as a book inc intern while pursuing her passion for creative nonfiction.

About book inc

book inc is a writing collective dedicated to helping writers draft, revise, and publish memoirs and novels. Our book incubators and revision workshops help writers realize their artistic and commercial potential.