Memory, Fiction, and My Uncle Joe

When my mom was moving into assisted living, my sister and I found among her things a little pistol all wrapped up in tissue paper and put in an old sugar sack and tied with a gold lamé bow. Whose gun? She couldn’t remember. She had no idea whom it belonged to or how it got there.

Now since that is a true story, I shouldn’t really have to worry about Chekhov’s little axiom about how if a gun is on stage, it must go off by the final act. But to make it a better, more complete story, I can tell you that I will come back to it and it will indeed fire—figuratively at least. This essay is about memory and how it is used in fiction, so be sure and remind me in case I don’t come back around. The gun will resurface for the sake of structure, and it in the interim also serves a symbolic purpose, evoking what we have all done from time to time: dressed ourselves up to look like something we are not. For instance, I once told friends that my grandmother had “money gone to bed,” as if to suggest I were someone from circumstances other than what I was from. Truth was my grandmother slept with her wallet under her pillow so no one could take it. She had a lot of things, but money would not be anywhere near the top of the list. She had four children—my mother being the next to the youngest and the youngest being my Uncle Joe who will figure into this essay as a central character.

The poet Anne Sexton said that it wasn’t important who her father was, what was important was who she thought he was. It reminds me of the old saying about how no two kids ever have the same parents: there is enough growth and change, for positive or negative, to prevent identical circumstances, not to mention the different personality components of the two individuals. The optimism here is that that is what has allowed and will continue to allow humans to tell the same stories again and again, ever forced to claim the backdrop and details that make their own stories different. Mark Twain said, “When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not.” Faulkner said, “Memory believes before Knowing remembers.”

One of my favorite literary examples focusing on memory would be The Glass Menagerie which Williams actually referred to as “a memory play” and said in the opening directions: “The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional values of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”

Certainly, when a writer is exploring his or her own work in search of emotional truth, interpretation is everything, and certainly, there is a way that emotional truth and factual truth often don’t match up. And yet, does that falsify the abstract one? If so, we would all be falsified. Haven’t we all returned to a place of childhood only to marvel at the tiny, squat commodes of an elementary school bathroom, the pasture of a distant relative that in your mind spanned miles and miles instead of a two-acre town lot? I thought of these universal places recently when I heard the poet Debora Gregor read a line about “the vacant lot of your childhood.” I looked around the room, so aware of how everyone sitting there in that moment likely envisioned a particular spot; and we saw it as it looked in childhood, which is probably very different from the way we would see it as an adult. And yet still, the place of our childhood—the place of memory—holds an incredible power as the source of who we are. A friend and I named our vacant lot Hillsville because of the small mounds of construction dirt left there. Our town was below sea level so it...