I remember you … sort of
The past is a province in a fairy tale, suspended in the midst of pain, beauty and freedom. It is a universe of mirrors and an infinitely arbitrary, yet exciting, itinerary of metamorphosis. Journalist Cesare Cunaccia
When I turned five (many many years ago) I received a big stuffed panda bear for my birthday. My mom commemorated the occasion with her Kodak camera. I have that same panda today, sitting in a prominent spot in my office. His button eyes have long since been replaced by hand-sewn ones, and his neck is a little floppy through loss of stuffing, but he has survived, proof positive that he became part of my life when I was a little girl.
Here’s my question: do I remember my fifth birthday party, the day I got my panda, or do I just imagine that I do? I think I remember, and I assume it must be a memory, and not simply made up, because I have the evidence to prove it really happened. Yet, I think back to that day and I don’t know if I have just concocted a memory from the photograph and from the panda sitting on my shelf.
The German writer/poet Gunter Grass (who just recently passed away) described the unreliability of memory well: “You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain – not falsification, but a shifting.”
Putting the question of dementia, as well as those with photographic memories aside, how confident can we be in our memories, even on our best days? I explore that idea in my upcoming romantic suspense novel, The Lair. The story centers around a young California woman, Daniela Dunn, who must travel back to her home town of Verona, Italy to attend her estranged father’s funeral. She’s obligated to stay in the same mansion where, a dozen years earlier, her memory, foggy though it is, tells her she experienced something very bad—so bad that it has affected her relationships ever since.
The problem is, everyone around her, everyone she trusts, including her loving, loyal mother, has assured her that the bad thing she thinks happened to her never happened, that she was “rescued” in the nick of time. Several therapists over many years have convinced Dani that not only is her memory faulty, but she must be a little bit crazy to insist that something happened when it so clearly didn’t.
It’s a twist on the controversial “false” vs. repressed memory cases that surface in the news periodically. Someone visits a therapist to work through an issue like anxiety or depression, and emerges claiming he or she was abused by a relative and only just remembered it because it had been repressed since childhood. An investigation takes place and in many instances, while nothing is proven, the reputation of the accused family member or friend is ruined. In some cases, juries have awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in judgments against the therapist, determining that the patient’s memories were somehow tampered with (with the best intentions) or even created, while under the therapist’s care. The fascinating thing, to me, is how easily any of our memories can be manipulated.
Memory, it turns out is, like your eccentric but lovable Aunt Gertrude: she’s kind of zany and unpredictable, but you’d miss her terribly if she were gone. In other words, we need a certain level of consistent memory in order to function (like knowing how to eat and tie our shoes and, oh yeah, pay the bills), but when it comes to more complex memories, we don’t just flip a switch on our mental TiVo and call up what we experienced before. Rather, according to Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, our memory “works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: you can go in there and change it, but so can other people.” In a 2013 TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory/transcript?language=en, Loftus describes experiments in which she has been able to create false memories in a significant percentage of her test population. Now that’s downright Total Recall-type scary, if you ask me. She uses an example, which a lot of people find controversial, in which the parent of an obese child might manipulate that child’s memory to improve their eating habits.
Imagine little Johnnie’s mom tells him over and over that once, a long time ago, he got sicker than a dog by eating Big Macs and fries. Johnnie thinks, “Whaaat? I don’t remember that.” But Mom keeps insisting it happened and Johnnie begins to wonder if maybe it really did take place. The idea, of course is that the next time Johnnie sees his favorite combo, he “remembers” it made him sick and passes on it. Hmmm. Maybe I had a bad experience with chocolate caramel bread pudding years ago … oh, I wish.
But our brains don’t have to be manipulated by others to create false memories; they can do that all on their own. Just ask the folks at the Innocence Project, which works to reverse dubious convictions by using DNA evidence that exonerates the defendant. Since 2000, there have been more than 260 post-conviction exonerations, many of them championed by the group. And in 72 percent of those cases, a major factor in the conviction was eyewitness reports. http://www.innocenceproject.org/free-innocent/improve-the-law/fact-sheets/dna-exonerations-nationwide. Imagine you find yourself at the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe you just look like the perpetrator. Two people swear under oath that you’re the culprit. They don’t know you, so they have no ax to grind. But you get identified just the same. The truth is, eyewitness accounts, even though juries seem to give them a lot of credence, aren’t always accurate. If you witnessed a crime that happened across the street in, say, the course of 
thirty seconds, would you be able to remember everything that happened, and who did what to whom, and what the bad guys looked like, compared to several other similar-looking people in a line up? I don’t think I could do it. And here’s something else that’s scary. Hal Arkowitz and Scott Lilienfeld write in Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/ that juries tend to rely heavily on eye witnesses who say they are “very sure” about their identification, even though those witnesses are often no more accurate than those who say they aren’t sure. Yikes!
Barbara Kingsolver, the novelist, sums it up nicely:
“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
My takeaway from all this is that my memories are filtered through my changing life story and the way I view the world. I need them, not only to remain grounded, but to fuel my imagination. They may change over time, and some of them may never be fully realized or crystal clear, and that’s okay. But it makes sense to be wary of those who might try, for whatever reason, to lead me down a fake memory lane.
My novel’s character, Dani, has felt isolated for many years because she can’t accept the kinds of memories others keep telling her she ought to have. Luckily, with the help of her close friend, Detective Gabe de la Torre, she begins to uncover the truth about what really happened to her. I won’t give it away (it’s romantic suspense, after all), but I think you’ll enjoy her thrilling, albeit dangerous, journey of discovery.
As for my fifth birthday party, I’m going to keep telling myself I remember getting that brand new panda bear, because I sure looked happy in the picture … and don’t my gal pals look adorable, too?!
What about you? Do your memories take on a slightly different aura each time you visit them? Which ones stand out the most? I’d love to hear from you.
P.S. If you read one of my earlier blogs about hibernating bears, you’ll be interested to know that no, panda bears do not hibernate.
