What happened to my past…
Please, don’t tell people what you’ve read in this post… It’s just between us. And if you want to hear my theatrical voiceover, hit the play button (only available to paid subscribers).
So, you know I was at the Central Coast Writers' Conference this Saturday. Lots of people want to write memoirs. It's funny because I've been going through boxes of pictures, old letters, and keepsakes. Naturally, I'd like to know how much one needs to remember from the past to write a whole memoir. My late friend, journalist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Alex Tizon wrote his called Big Little Man. I remember us walking around Monterey, CA, reminiscing and him bird scratching in a notebook. Remembering?
I wrote about memory in a recent post, questioning how much we really remember, how accurate memory is, and why so. I feel hesitant to trust memories completely. Those that I actually still have. Because, it turns out I'm missing like 95% of my life. I want to know what happened to my past as I tried to reconstruct it from an old diary, hundreds of photographs, manila envelopes marked "important stuff," and conversations with longtime friends.