Last year, for my birthday, my wife gave me a copy of “I Remember,” an unusual memoir by the artist Joe Brainard. It’s a tidy little book, less than two hundred pages long, made entirely from short, often single-sentence paragraphs beginning with the words “I remember.” Read some of them and you’ll immediately get the idea:
The recollections aren’t in any overarching order, and they don’t tell a story, as such. But they add up to a picture of a particular person’s American childhood and young adulthood in the nineteen-forties and fifties, and evoke what it’s like to grow up in general. “I Remember” isn’t centered on the consequential incidents that adults find interesting in retrospect. It catalogues random impressions (“I remember once when it was raining on one side of our fence but not on the other”), fads and appearances (“I remember very thin belts”), and shards of social and technological reality presented simply, as a kid experiences them (“I remember DDT”). The memoir doesn’t slip down any rabbit holes; it ambles through memory. It’s also honest and unsparing. (“I remember feeling sorry for kids at church, or school, who had ugly mothers.”) “I Remember” is an easy book to read, but it must have been hard to write.
The book feels especially magical because it’s so apparently casual. Our memories are treasure houses that we struggle to unlock; self-consciousness, forgetfulness, and censoriousness bar the door. Brainard seems to have strolled through. In an afterword to “I Remember,” his friend the poet Ron Padgett recalls how their circle reacted to the book: “Everyone saw that he had made a marvelous discovery, and many of us wondered why we hadn’t thought of such an obvious idea ourselves.” Writing a memoir can be dreary, scary, self-important; why not just remember?
Ever since reading “I Remember,” I’ve been following the Brainardian approach in a file on my computer. He was inspired by the terse, concrete lines of Gertrude Stein and the repetition printmaking of Andy Warhol. (Happily, my colleague David S. Wallace published an appreciation of Brainard’s work as a poet, painter, and cartoonist a few weeks ago.) My ambitions are simpler: I’ve been content to recall the blue-and-tan sandals my mom bought me when I was in kindergarten, which I found unmanly; Katie, the girl in seventh grade whom people assumed I had a crush on because we both talked too much; and the time I got so scared by a gross-out scene in a science-fiction movie that my dad had to take me out of the theatre. I’m no Joe Brainard—my memories would bore you, so I won’t keep listing them out. But they don’t bore me.
Like many people, I find that memory leads to memory. We can remember a lot, if we give ourselves the time and space to try. Most of the time, we drift just briefly down memory lane. This is like walking only a few blocks from your apartment; because you start in the same place each time, you see the same spots over and over. Maybe we revisit the scenes that are most relevant to, or most reminiscent of, our lives as we live them now. But if you wander a bit further, you discover rewarding memories that lack obvious relevance. Does it matter that your first watch was a Casio F-91W—a boxy, rubbery digital thing with tiny metal studs for buttons? That you used to be afraid of waves at the beach? That the paint in your elementary-school hallway smelled sweet?
It doesn’t matter, and yet such memories can enlarge the scope of your past. They can increase your sense of temporal expansiveness, reminding you of just how much you’ve seen and done, of how long you’ve lived, of where you were and who you were. And so, strangely, random memories can become relevant to the expanded version of you that remembering creates. The more you remember, the deeper your sense of yourself becomes.
It’s striking, given how many years we have behind us, that we don’t spend more time remembering them. But the demands of today keep us trapped in the prison of the present. Who has time to sink into the past? There’s a bit of a Catch-22 here. It can be intensely rewarding to remember more of your life, but it takes time; if you don’t have time, you don’t experience the rewards, and so you become less inclined to prioritize the enlivening of your own past. In the third volume of “My Struggle,” the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard records his scant memories of early childhood—a remembered house, brother, mom, and dad, and some images possibly derived from photographs—and concludes, “This ghetto-like state of incompleteness is what I call my childhood.” There can be diminishing returns to spending time in such a place.
Of course, in writing “My Struggle,” Knausgaard remembered enough about his life to fill six volumes of autofiction. How did he do it? “I’ve developed a method, which is being in the present, sitting here, drinking some coffee, thinking of a memory,” he told me, after the final volume was published in English. “I would just start writing, and then I remember something, and then I write about that, and then I remember something else.” The hopscotch approach is important, he went on, “because then the moments will maybe not always be the important moments but could be the moments that are just beside the important ones. There’s a freedom in that.” Freedom from predictability, presumably, and from familiarity—but also freedom from the constraints imposed by who we are today.
Few of us are writing memoirs. But we can still decide to make recollection part of our lives. A structure or system or set of routines helps, but it doesn’t have to feel like work; it can be fun, improvisational, a different form of mindfulness, an alternative to your phone. Cues to memory are everywhere, and they’re pleasingly random: if the Pavement song “Shady Lane” comes on the radio, you might remember when you heard it for the first time. Then, with a little patient effort, you might see your girlfriend putting “Slanted and Enchanted” into the tape deck of her car, which had a blue vinyl interior, and silver aluminum cranks with rounded ends for rolling the windows up and down. If you’re lucky enough to have boxes of old photographs, you can rifle through them, recovering memories of whole vacations you’ve forgotten. You can put an old address into Google Street View, then navigate around the neighborhood until the memories flow. There’s an interesting rhythm of memory and imagination into which you can settle. Perhaps some memories are sturdier than others; you can use your less reliable memories as gossamer bridges to connect islands of relative certainty.
Those islands do exist, even in your distant past. In the nineteen-seventies, a psychologist named Harry Bahrick conducted studies of long-term memory. He found that people presented with their old high-school yearbooks could often reliably recall the names of people they’d last seen three decades earlier. Related research has shown that people can remember vocabulary words acquired in Spanish class many years before. Memory fades, but not uniformly. There are anchor points. If you can tie yourself to one you know, or find a new one, you can sometimes climb to places that are normally out of reach.
Sometimes memories come to us. A few years ago, an acquaintance told me that she was in the midst of “eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing” therapy, or E.M.D.R.—a treatment in which you think about traumatic events in your past while moving your eyes in ways that are supposed to make the memories less potent. (The therapy is a bit of a mystery: there’s no good explanation for why it works, but it is “conditionally recommended” by the American Psychiatric Association for the treatment of P.T.S.D. because some people find it so helpful.) We didn’t get into why she was doing E.M.D.R.; instead, we talked about how, as a by-product of the therapy, she’d suddenly found herself immersed in newly available memories. She now recalled scenes from her childhood with extraordinary vividness. The therapy, she said, was worth it just for that.
I have no plans to try E.M.D.R., or to write six volumes of autofiction. But I do spend some time each week organizing the basement—usually in the mornings, before the kids wake up—and I’ve discovered that memories come to me there. Looking through shelves of books, opening bins of belongings that have gone untouched for years, I sometimes get lost in recollection. I used to think of this as procrastination. Now I try to see it as a worthy goal, alongside the clearing out of old stuff.
The days in our house begin around six. Pour the cereal, make the waffles, pack the lunch, take out the garbage; then gym, work, phone calls, emails; then dinner, a little playtime, some scrolling, baths, bedtime stories, and bed. There isn’t much time for mind-wandering. It’s hard to be in the past, or even in the present, when the next minute is always here. Time slips away. So that’s another reason to spend a little more of it remembering. A lot gets lost, but maybe less than you think. ♦
