The Woman Who Can't Forget (11 page)

In a wonderful irony, after having hated school so much myself, I am now the administrator of a school, with kids from kindergarten through seventh grade joyfully ensconced in the middle of all of the heyday of their tempestuous lives. When they come in with their skinned knees or are terrified because their parents are late to pick them up, I feel intensely how real the trauma they are feeling is, and I think they sense that about me.

This past fall, one of the girls at the school came into my office, and I could see that though she was trying to hide it, she was very upset. She told me that her mother had not arrived yet, and when her mom didn't answer when she called her on her cell phone, she was on the verge of panic. She is eight years old, and I knew all too well the terror she was feeling. When her mom appeared at the door a little bit later, she ran to her and blurted out, “I thought you were dead.” Because I remember that time of life so well, I knew that she really did fear that her mother was dead, and I try every day to bring that awareness into my work with the children.

What a gift, at long last, to be able to make some good out of the way the traumas of my childhood have continued to haunt me.

O
ne of the intriguing thoughts in Benedict Carey's article about the value of writing down a life narrative was what he wrote about how the crafting of life stories doesn't seem to really stop; most people are continually recrafting the story of their lives over time. As one researcher who has worked in this area describes the process, “Adult identity can be understood as an anthology of stories that we constantly edit and from which we extract ever-new meanings…. We first create the themes or ideologies of our personal stories during adolescence,” and then in adult life “we remember, revise, and add to these stories constantly.” One of the pioneers in this area of research, known as narrative psychology, is Dan McAdams, who explains the process of continually deriving new meaning from our life memories this way: “Let's say I'm thinking of going to medical school. That may motivate me to think about my past in ways that answer the question, ‘How did I get this interest in becoming a doctor?' I may prioritize certain events. I might remember a conversation that I had when I was 16 with a neighbor who was a physician, and think, ‘That was a turning point.' In light of my goals, I'll reconstruct the past.”

This whole notion of continuous life story modification especially fascinates me because I seem to have no ability to do so; in truth, I do not have any desire to do so. In fact, to me, any changes of the facts or discrepancies in my memories would be highly disturbing. Intellectually, of course, I can see the value of what Daniel Schacter calls bias in telling ourselves the story of our lives, and my own life story has been terribly disappointing, but nevertheless, emotionally the idea of distortions is upsetting.

I may not have crafted the kind of selective life narrative that most people do, but I have kept voluminous records of my actual life narrative. To my mind, the value and comfort of getting the days and the delineations of the discrete phases of my life down on paper has been knowing that I've done so with both accuracy and precision.

Another of the counterintuitive ways in which my memory seems to have affected me is that I have felt a compulsion to keep journals of all the days of my life. As I got older and my memory moved into high gear, with memories constantly flashing through my mind and beginning to drive me crazy, I found that journaling helped a great deal with keeping the swirl under control. If I didn't write things down, I would get a swimming feeling in my head and would become emotionally overwhelmed.

When people first hear about my journals, they often think that I must have memorized them and that they explain why I have such detailed recall. But the truth is that I rarely look at them, and have never spent much time reading back through them. If you look at the photo of one of them here you'll get some sense of how voluminous they are.

For the single five-year period of January 1987 to December 1991, for example, my journal entries cover 350 double-sided 8½ × 11 inch pages, each side divided into 32 boxes of written text measuring 1.5 × 1 inch and containing roughly 60 to 70 words each. That means each side contains over 2,100 words, the equivalent of 9 typed manuscript pages per side, so my journals for just those years alone number more than 6,300 “typed” pages. The total number of pages in my journals written during all the years I've kept them is over 50,000.

I don't sit and read through my journals, but I do dip into them now and then because I love to be able to go back and see my notes about all the little things that were going on when I was actually writing them. Many people find this one of the oddest things about the way that my memory has affected me. I know there is a contradiction here and it's always been interesting to me. After all, with my memory, I should be the last person on earth who would need to keep a journal. The truth is I really don't know why I was so compelled to write my journals. All I can really explain is what I found satisfying about keeping them.

I think my journaling is part of the same impulse that compelled me to save so many of the items of my life. The closest I come to understanding it is that writing a note about an event makes it real and forever part of history. Once it's on paper, I own it, like owning my books or records or dolls. When a friend once said to me, “I don't understand. If you have it all in your head, why do you need to write it down?” I told him it's because in some indefinable way, it makes these memories real. For me, it's a physical and emotional reassurance that the event really happened. I can't accept living with just the memory. It has to be tangible—something I can hold on to physically, something I can handle. What feels to me like the most accurate explanation is that to write an event down means it really happened. It's like creating an artifact. Archaeologists don't just describe what they found of ancient civilizations. They bring back statues or pieces of pottery, and we build museums around them. My journals are like artifacts for me. I have the record in my mind, but I still want something I can physically look at and touch.

My journal entries are not reflective; they're not commentaries on my life or a place where I work out my interpretations of my life. They are simple records, and the entries just describe key things that happened in a day. Here, for example, is what I wrote for Friday, February 26, 1993:

As you can see, my journal entries show the lack of selectivity or focus on the most important moments of a day that is characteristic of my recall; that entry blends both the horrifying news of the World Trade Center bombing with the most trivial details.

I started journaling on Monday, August 24, 1981. I had met my first boyfriend in April. I was a sophomore, and he was a senior, and when he first flirted with me, I was nervous and a little intimidated. He drove a black Camaro with a T-top glass roof and had curly dark hair, and when I met him, he seemed mysterious, a type I find alluring. We didn't start going out until June, and I was crazy about him and the whole experience of dating.

During that summer, I found myself compelled to write down the details of what we did each day on a wall calendar in my bedroom. This was when I launched into my practice of highly detailed journaling.

I think I was prompted to start this more detailed journal keeping because I knew that our relationship was bound to end before long; summer would end, and he was going to start college, and even though he was going locally, things would be different. I was so happy that summer, and I decided that I'd keep a physical record of every day for the rest of the time he and I spent together.

In fact, I had had a kind of prejournal period, which was preparation for writing the journals themselves. When I was a kid in Manhattan, I watched TV in the living room, and as I watched Walter Cronkite on the nightly news, one of my favorite shows, or
The Dick Cavett Show
(which I thought was called the Dick Carrot Show, because of his red hair), I would sit in front of the TV for hours watching the shows and draw lines like this:

—taking proto-notes before I knew how to write. Years later, in a funny twist, in the summer of 1986, I wound up having breakfast with Dick Cavett at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He was a client of my dad at that time. I was tempted to tell him how obsessed with him I had been, but I thought I should probably keep that to myself.

Even before that proto-journaling, I was drawn to record keeping. When we moved to California, I started creating a family tree of our extended family and ancestors on both my mother's and father's sides. I still update it regularly, and the whole family knows that I'm the keeper of our history. When someone has a baby, I add the child, and relatives call to make sure I've done so.

Then, in 1976, when my family went to Phoenix for Christmas vacation with two other families and stayed at the Arizona Biltmore, a vacation I love to remember, I had the urge to make a record of the trip. I was intent not to forget it, and I had the feeling that if I wrote it down, I could keep it with me, like the family tree and the little pocket book full of mementos that I had taken with me from New Jersey. That's when I started writing brief notes on my Girl Scout calendar, which I kept doing year after year, until I got more elaborate with my note making that summer of 1981.

I've stopped journaling several times in my life, but eventually I would realize that I had to go back and get all of that time down. In 1987 I stopped writing in October and didn't start up again until June 1988, when I realized I needed to stop the swirling in my head. It took almost a month, but I got October 1987 through June 1988 down. Then in November 1989 I started my first job, as a production assistant on the NBC sitcom
A Family for Joe,
which starred Robert Mitchum, and I was so busy at work that I couldn't write. When I went on hiatus in May 1990, I again realized I needed to get everything down, and by Friday, June 15, 1990, I had all of 1990 written down in great detail.

In January 1997, I was adamant that I was going to stop: I wanted a break from all of the time it took, and I was determined that was it. I remember telling that to a friend, and he just laughed at me. Too many times my friends had seen me sitting in a corner scribbling notes to myself while everyone else was watching TV or listening to music at parties. Sure enough, that April I was visiting a friend in northern California, and I had brought my day-book with me. As I sat there in the hotel, I started writing everything from January on.

In 2000 I started my longest-running effort to stop; this time it was for four years. But in November 2004 I bought a blank book, divided it into the five years that had passed, and started to write again. By the end of the year I had it all down, and I felt immense relief. I no longer write in my journal most of the time, though, and when I look at my earlier journals now, I am glad that I don't feel as much need to work on them so much. I occasionally decide I want to get back to it, but I'm more selective now about what I cover. After having stopped altogether in 2006, on January 1, 2007, I wrote down all of the special days of the year just passed. I did the same on January 1, 2008, for all of 2007's special days.

I wish I could say that journaling kept enough control over the swirling of my memories that they didn't overwhelm me anymore in the way they had in ninth grade. But when events were emotionally stressful, the memories would get the best of me again. The next particularly bad period after that breakdown in ninth grade, in which my memories raged out of control, was after my boyfriend broke up with me, on December 29, 1981, the day before my sixteenth birthday. We had a good relationship in the beginning, but like most other relationships at that age, the ending was miserable, and it took me a year to get over it. I have a friend who always said, “First loves kill you” and that was the case for me.

What was so devastating was not that I was really so in love with him, but that I kept reliving the relationship. My mind would flash back through the days we'd spent together, and even long after I should have been over him, I'd find myself remembering what we'd done on the same day the year before. We had met on April 1, and when April 1 rolled around, there I was right back in that prior year:
It was two days after President Reagan was shot, and I was hanging out with my friend Dean under the tree near the school's