04/20/2010 12:00 am
Life
Pandora's Box of Memories
The author of Love Child reflects on mistaken memories – and the crushing wave of true remembrance.
Soon after my book Love Child was published, I got a message on Facebook from a Joanna O’Neal. The name didn’t ring a bell. When I saw who she was, my heart stopped beating. It understood the message before the words unfurled in my conscious mind. Joanna wrote that she was Griffin O’Neal’s wife.
I hadn’t seen Griffin since we were both 13, more than 30 years ago. I was living with my sister, Anjelica, and Anjelica was living with Griffin’s father, Ryan, who swung from fun to frightening at warp speed. Griffin and I were allies. We shared his bedroom (there was never any question that his sister, Tatum, would share hers) and his king-sized waterbed. He was small and freckled with sea-green eyes, elfin and elusive. When my sister left Ryan, shattering our improvised family, I felt like I was abandoning him.
If we’d had e-mail and cellphones, perhaps we wouldn’t have lost touch — but the 20th century was a different world. All I knew of Griffin’s later life was what the lurid headlines at supermarket checkouts told me. None of it was good. Even so, Joanna’s message fired me with an astonished delight at the thought of hearing Griffin’s voice once again.
I lost a lot of people during my childhood, starting with my mother, who died in a car crash when I was four. I lived in a different house, with different people, almost every year after that. I learned, unconsciously, not to look back. My heart callused easily. Emotion became superficial and transient, like wind on the surface of a cold, dark lake.
This deadness was accomplished, I should add, without the use of drugs. Its only agent was the inexorable mental process that packages the chaos of life into a neat narrative, defanging the feelings involved. These narratives, under the guise of memories, take on the familiarity of truth — and only if you examine them stringently, as you do when you write a memoir, do you realize how treacherous they are. Things don’t add up; they stop making sense; the memories shape-shift and mock you until you have no certainty about what happened at all.
The memories I had carried through my life turned out to be not lies exactly, but at least partly fictional. That shocked me; it felt like a loss. In the past year, the space they left has been filled by something entirely unexpected: a different kind of memory, the heart-stopping, time-stopping rush that I felt when I read Joanna O’Neal’s message. There’s no "Oh, I remember," no words or places or names. It’s a wave that swamps me and tumbles me into a disoriented, strangely comforted pulp.
This happened to me, in spades, in Ireland last December, when I went to visit Paddy Lynch. Paddy was my dad’s groom and driver; his two youngest daughters were my friends when I lived there, before I left at the age of seven. As I entered the house with his oldest daughter, Mary, Paddy emerged from another room, so small he barely reached my shoulder. He was 85, and he had, to my amazement, the most beautiful skin I’ve ever seen: the skin of a debutante, creamy and smooth over the high cheekbones that were suddenly so familiar. "It’s great to see you, Paddy," I said, or something like that, as I embraced him.
Then Mrs. Lynch appeared, no taller than Paddy, perfectly coiffed and made up, wearing a raspberry-colored two-piece suit. The instant I saw her, I broke down in tears. I don’t mean that a few picturesque tear-tracks wended their way touchingly down my face. I mean I was a soggy heap of streaming nose and heaving chest, trying desperately to keep myself presentable.
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I really enjoyed this article, particularly as a memoirist and instructor of memoir. Also, coincidentally, I just wrote a post on a similar subject which you can read at http://www.dianaraab.wordpress.com.
Thank you!
DIANA
Like you Allegra, I lost my mother when I was just a little girl as well. Left with 10 siblings and a single father to raise me. I equate it to being the runt of the litter, one of many vying for the affection of the parent.
I have very few specific memories from my childhood. I envy people who have total recall when it comes to their upbringing. Places, faces, people, foods, trips….they are all as clear as day to them. But for me it is odd, I can remember when I was 9 years old and stuck a fork in an electrical socket, the plum and apple trees in our backyard and jumping off the top ledge of the church across the street from our house. Yet I can’t remember certain friends I played with. Their names and faces aren’t even a blur, they just don’t register at all.
I often wonder if it is old age settling in or if I have purposely blocked people and events from my psyche.
As I was reading this I reached the part where Allegra wrote "I lived in a different house, with different people, almost every year after that. I learned, unconsciously, not to look back. My heart callused easily. Emotion became superficial and transient, like wind on the surface of a cold, dark lake. This deadness was accomplished, I should add, without the use of drugs. Its only agent was the inexorable mental process that packages the chaos of life into a neat narrative, defanging the feelings involved. These narratives, under the guise of memories, take on the familiarity of truth — and only if you examine them stringently, as you do when you write a memoir, do you realize how treacherous they are. Things don’t add up; they stop making sense; the memories shape-shift and mock you until you have no certainty about what happened at all."
This caused me to stop reading and to re-read it. The words reached out and grabbed me. These words didn’t just touch me, they shook me to the core. I had to take some time to think about why her words had such an impact on me. Then I realized I was affected by this description because I could sum my early childhood the same way.
I did not lose my mother and I did not live with different people, but I did live in a different house more than every year, on a consistent basis. My parents moved so much my memories are so different from any of my siblings. It is almost as though we weren’t raised in the same family. When we all get together and reminisce I often tell them that I have no memory of it.
I know that there are memories locked up in the file cabinet if my mind that should never be unlocked, however as I get older it seems the locks are loosening and I catch glimpses of the awful things that were done or attempted to me by "unknowns" and I wonder if the good real memories are tramped behind the "monsters".
Thank you all for your words and memories. EileenAlannah, you express it beautifully. I want to have written that!
ChromeToe, how did I remember? Just went and sat in a coffee shop for a couple of hours every day with a pen in my hand, and followed the trail of memories. Things came that I didn’t think I remembered, and - as I wrote - I was surprised by how unstable were the memories I thought I had. YOu’ll probably find you remember an awful lot more than you think you do, if you start writing.