The Woman Who Can't Forget (9 page)

Among my favorite things to do when we visited LA was to go to Burbank Studios with my dad. The walls in the hallway were lined with pictures of all the Screen Gems shows like
I Dream of Jeannie
and
Bewitched,
and I spent hours walking up and down those halls looking at them. The most special day there was when I saw David Cassidy. For two years, I had had a huge crush on him, and I had made my dad take me to see him in concert at Madison Square Garden. There I was at the Burbank Studios one day, wandering around the Columbia offices by myself, and I heard someone behind me. Instead of turning around to look, I bent down and looked backward between my legs, and who was it? David Cassidy. I let out a shriek and took off running.

I also loved playing on the lot of Burbank Studios, especially on the set of
The Waltons,
a show I watched religiously. I would swing on the swings and feed the chickens, and run gleefully around the house, which was just a facade and floor. I was a wonderfully fortunate child, and I so wish that I had been happy about actually moving out to California. But when the time came, I was devastated.

In the spring of 1974, my parents decided that all of the travel back and forth was too difficult, and we moved into a rented house in LA, but even then I thought the move was only going to be temporary. I was still terribly upset that I had to move most of my collection into our attic in South Orange because my parents had rented our house out to another family. I could live with this situation because I knew all of my things were protected, and it was only going to be for a year. Then we were going to be moving back to New Jersey and I could put everything back in place.

The moment that I was told that we were going to be staying in LA is one of my most emotionally upsetting early memories. I was in the bathtub in my parents' bathroom of our rented house in LA in April 1975 when I got the news. I was washing with a bar of Irish Spring, which may be the reason I hate the smell of that soap. My mom came in and told me we were not going back to New Jersey and were going to be buying a house in LA. I was distraught. That was the most traumatic moment of my young life, and it was at this time that I started to truly obsess about how happy I'd been in New Jersey and New York. I started making lists of my friends from back east, constantly looking at pictures of our New Jersey house and thinking about the past all the time.

For whatever reason, right after I got to LA, I began to develop much more complete and vivid memories. From July 1, 1974, on, I remember in much more detail. I was eight, and I know—and have always felt, even then—that my memory underwent a deep and basic change of some kind.

The move was grueling. I was upset all the time in those last days in New Jersey and my friends were upset too. The night before we left the house, my mom, Michael, and I sat in my mom's room crying because we didn't want to leave. I felt my world was shattering. My friends gave me a going-away party, and my present was a little phone book, with a cover that looked like blue jeans, with my name on it. They had put all their addresses and phone numbers in it, which made it the perfect gift for me. I crammed that and all sorts of mementos from New Jersey into a camel-colored corduroy pocketbook and took to thinking of the contents of that pocketbook as all my worldly possessions from New Jersey. I put notes from friends that I'd saved in it, lists of names of my friends, pictures that I'd drawn of my house, a set of photos of all the rooms in the house that my mom took for me, and photos from my going-away party. I felt that I had captured my life in New Jersey in that little purse, and I still have it, still crammed full of all of those artifacts of a time I still find special. To have those lists of names and pictures and notes made me feel that I had the people still with me, and from then on, it has been important to me to keep all sorts of mementos of that kind.

In 1996, twenty-two years after we had moved from South Orange, I went back to see my old neighborhood and took twenty-eight rolls of film of the house and the streets and even the road signs so I could have a physical record of all of that. I often say that my ideal life would have been to have lived in the same house for all of my years, and I envy the people who have done so. Although we moved into a wonderful house in LA and I had enjoyed my visits there so much, I knew that my life would never be the same. In part because I had come to abhor change so much, adjusting to my new life in LA was a real struggle.

I've always felt that the trauma of moving to California was related in some way to the way my memory began to strengthen so much not long after, so I was fascinated to learn about a phenomenon known as the memory bump. Though the general rule about forgetting is that we do so more and more as time goes on, one of the big surprises in memory research is that there is in fact a spike in autobiographical memories for the years between ages ten and thirty. The memories during this bump also tend to be more vivid.

What especially fascinated me about this finding is that it was at about this age when my memory started to shift gears. But my memory didn't just bump, it went into overdrive and has never slowed down. Not long after we moved to California, my memory started to swirl out of control in my head. That happened in two stages—one when I was eleven and then again when I was fourteen.

As with so much of memory science, there are varying theories about what causes the bump. One is that we have many more emotional and novel experiences in our lives during these years, and in middle age to later years, we are more accustomed to so many experiences. Many people remember the first time they had sex, for example, but as they get older, they don't remember particular instances of having sex nearly so well. Another idea is that our brains simply have more memory power during these years, consolidating long-term memories better. The most interesting explanation to me is that most people have more memories from this time period because it is in these years that we are generally formulating and fixing in our minds our sense of self, and memory and self are closely intertwined.

An intriguing question about this relationship is which way it goes: Do we develop a sense of self because we begin to store more long-term autobiographical memories, or do we develop more memories from this time because our minds have evolved a firmer sense of self, which selects for the experiences we remember?

Adults past this age may have new bumps later in life if their lives are powerfully disrupted in some way, such as by divorce. They may at that time go through a process of, in some ways, creating a new life for themselves, and to an extent craft a revised sense of identity, and this may cause them to encode into long-term memory a higher quotient of memories once again.

Though it has always seemed to me that the reason my memories began to swirl so wildly through my mind stemmed from the trauma I felt about the move to California, perhaps it has more to do with my brain having developed in certain ways at this time, along the lines of growth that might explain the memory bump. The most thought-provoking insight to me about the memory bump is this notion that more memories get firmly stored away at this time because we are launching into the major enterprise of working out our sense of self—of who we are as an individual person, apart from our families and friends.

I think the fact that I have such especially strong recall from these first years of the process of self-building backs this theory up powerfully, because the memories I've retained from those years have been intensely self-defining. They were difficult years, and because I remember them so well, I can say perhaps with more certainty how they've shaped my psyche. I've often wondered whether my sense of self would have developed entirely differently if we had never moved to California. I can never really know for sure. The question is one that would haunt me through the next phase of my life, which I call my “roller-coaster years.”

I
read an article in
The New York Times
a while back by psychology reporter Benedict Carey in which he wrote, “Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life.” Constructing a life story, and continually recrafting that story, the article went on to explain, helps a person to define herself, work out what sort of person she thinks she is, make choices about important life decisions such as what career to pursue, and discover a sense of the purpose or meaning in her life. As Carey also wrote, these life stories, when people are asked to write them down, tend to break down into episodes, along the lines of chapters, written in outline form, and they emphasize a key set of pivotal or defining experiences centering around what are called self-defining memories.

An explosion of work has been done in recent years in the study of how autobiographical memory is crucial in the shaping of people's life stories, particularly during the school years and into what is called emerging adulthood, in the twenties. As one of the leading researchers in this area writes, “Because the life story is constructed from significant memories that are connected into a coherent, ongoing narrative, autobiographical memory is the raw material from which identity is constructed as a life story.”

The argument is that one's sense of self depends in large part on autobiographical memories—not only on the actual memories but also on the meaning attached to those memories and the lessons a person thinks she has learned from them. As the authors of one thought-provoking paper on the subject write, “Our knowledge of self is very much tied up with the ‘story' of how what we have experienced has made us who we are, and how who we are has led us to do what we have done.”

Interestingly, it's just about the same time that the memory bump begins, around ten years of age, that we seem to start to learn how to tell good stories about our lives, to recount events that have happened to us in coherent ways. As anyone who has been told a story by a young child can attest, kids younger than age ten generally don't know how to weave a good tale; they often ramble on without any real point or punch line. The development of the storytelling ability seems to go along with the process of constructing the very story of who we are.

But it's not during the elementary and middle school years, research suggests, that we begin to truly craft this story; it's only as we head into later adolescence and early adulthood that we begin to derive what will become guiding lessons about life and about ourselves from the memories we've stored, privileging a certain set for special emphasis—those called self-defining memories—while culling out a huge number of others. This offers a persuasive explanation about why adolescence is such a roiling, tempestuous time; young people at that age haven't quite fully constructed their sense of self, and their identities feel vulnerable, even under siege at times, and the process of beginning to determine who you think you really,
truly
are can be excruciating. It certainly was for me, and remembering those days vividly, I have enormous sympathy about the process.

This shaping of a life story is not a conscious process, like writing a story, though a good deal of conscious reflection may be involved. For some people, that reflection unfortunately intensifies into rumination, which can lead to deep depression and even suicidal thoughts. Far too many adolescents commit suicide, and this struggle with the crafting of a firm and empowering sense of self may well be an important contributing factor.

Though we don't simply choose what our life story will be, it is tailored in ways that give our memories of our lives a sense of meaning, and the memories that are recalled in support of our life story also vary over time. As one article about this research explains, “If you ask college students to tell you their most important memories, and then surprise them six months later by asking again, they will repeat stories at a rate of just 12 percent.”

This new emphasis on memory itself as a shaper, not just a record, of our identities is a fascinating complement to other theories of the forces that make us who we are, such as about genetics and the effects of parenting styles. One of the most interesting aspects of my memory is the way in which it throws light on these new ideas about memory and the life story versus those other theories.

Those elementary and middle school years, and all the way through adolescence, are a crucible. We often feel that the smallest slight from a friend, or the taunts that kids have such unlimited creativity about hurling, are devastating wounds. Our emotions are raging at this age, and we fly off the handle and sulk and become irrationally upset regularly. Anyone with children this age knows this well. I remember it well from my own life.

I know from talking with my friends through the years that plenty of people do retain some memory of the pains from those middle childhood days. But most people's minds clear themselves of the vast majority of them. Even while we are young, normally our minds are constantly clearing themselves of the traumas of these experiences. If you ask a child about a temper tantrum she had a few years before, or remind him about how he was frightened of swimming in the deep end of the pool, she or he may well not remember those things at all, and almost certainly won't have the same view of them as they did at the time.

Most people put these times into perspective as they mature. Some good research has shown that the way people most often process these negative childhood experiences into memory is to derive positive lessons out of them, crafting them into nuggets of life wisdom. There is also a good deal of selective forgetting about them. Of course, some people focus more on negative memories in crafting their life stories, and derive self-undermining rather than empowering lessons from them, and that leads to a great deal of trouble in life.

That's a powerful testament to what a wonder it is that the human brain seems to have such a natural proclivity for privileging the positive in building memory. A remarkable finding about the memory bump that begins at age ten and backs this up is that the spike in memories seems to be much more for positive times than for negative ones, confirming that usually, many more of the positive experiences during this phase of life make their way into long-term memory than negative ones. Exactly why this is the case hasn't yet been established and may never be agreed on. Do we actually lay down fewer negative memories than positive ones, or does our memory privilege the positive ones in the process of recall? Scientists don't know.

I can say unequivocably, given the richness of my own recall for this period, that it surely is one of the greatest gifts of forgetting that most of that emotional turmoil becomes hazy over time in most people's minds, if not completely forgotten. In this regard, my memory is entirely different. It did not seem to select for the positive in this way as I began the process of constructing my life story, which I think has contributed greatly to the negative self-image I began to develop during these years. My sense is that this is one of the most profound ways in which my memory has shaped me: those roiling middle childhood days continue to haunt me on a daily basis. I believe that had my memory been normal, I would have had a wonderfully happy life.

After all, we had a great life in LA in so many ways, and my brother, Michael, fell in love with the place right away. My parents bought a lovely French country–style ranch house in the Encino section of Los Angeles with a large backyard planted with flower gardens and a pool, which I hung out at for untold hours with my friends. The house and yard were so striking that people regularly rang our doorbell asking if we would consider selling the house. My favorite thing about our house was my bedroom, which looked like a room in a doll's house. It had a peaked ceiling with exposed beams and a window seat with cushions and pillows, and the windows were framed by white shutters. It even had a matching bedspread and drapes and wallpaper that I loved, with a floral print in pink and blue and green and yellow—a perfect girly hideaway.

I did come to enjoy a good deal about the LA lifestyle. For one thing, my parents loved to give parties, and for the first couple of years, we had one at the house almost every weekend. My parents had already developed a large circle of friends during the time we'd spent in LA, and they were like a big extended family for us. We also went to the beach all the time, often with the family next door. Their son, Gregg, was just four months younger than me, and their daughter, Stephanie, was just five months older than Michael. The four of us became inseparable. I can see how my life might have evolved at this point; it should have been absolutely fantastic.

I ought to have gotten over the pain of the move from Jersey fairly quickly, had a great life as a teenager—though with the normal ups and downs of those years—headed off to college looking forward to a new adventure, and then fallen in love and started a family, as I'd been intent on doing even as a young child. I might well also have pursued a great career as an entertainment producer, which I thought at times I might like to do. That's much too simple for a life story, of course, but as an abstract outline, it's a life I might well have had. When I got to adolescence, though, and the process of shaping an empowering, fundamentally positive sense of self should have kicked in, it seems that in large part because of the way my memory works, things didn't happen that way for me. I was not able to privilege positive memories, and those elementary and middle school days haunted me at the time I should have been stepping back from them and crafting a forward-looking and esteem-building life story. They haunt me still.

When I started school in California, I went through culture shock. I was in the fourth grade when we moved, and the school my parents enrolled me in was much bigger than any other school I'd gone to. In both New York and New Jersey, I had attended small schools. At my school in South Orange, there were only seven others in my class. Now I was thrown into a class of 134, and I had my first encounter with the childhood scourge of cliques. Getting a read on who was popular and who was not, and the whole notion of popularity, and then figuring out the rules of the game was a nightmare. I felt utterly lost, and I found myself thinking about New Jersey almost constantly.

Often after school I'd sit in our backyard looking out over the valley and think about those days. I was never able to put them behind me and make the kind of break that most other children do fairly readily, maybe after a first few really tough months, when they move.

On top of feeling rooted to New Jersey, I began to find my classes a struggle, I think in large part because, as the scientists were to confirm later, my mind was bad at the kind of memorization that becomes so important in school at this time. My mind doesn't memorize well, especially not the kinds of facts that make up so much of what kids learn at that age, and I find it hard to focus on things that don't genuinely interest me.

One of my most painful memories from this time is of my parents telling me that one of my teachers had said to them that I needed to “have a fire lit under me,” because I was lazy about my schoolwork. I think I appeared lazy because I was frustrated by the assignments, and I probably seemed not to be applying myself. The worse I felt about leaving New Jersey, the more I withdrew into myself, and into my memories, during those first two years.

I did have one almost magically good year of school, in sixth grade. My parents sent me to a new school that year, St. Michael's and All Angels Parish Day School, much more the kind of school I'd been used to. My class had only eighteen children, and I was well prepared for the switch because the summer before, my parents had enrolled me in St. Michael's summer school. I thrived at St. Michael's, and to this day I carry that year very close in my heart.

My teacher, Miss Drew, had just graduated from Smith College, and this was her first class. She had lots of energy and was full of fun ideas about how to teach. When we studied colonial history, for example, she brought in a big antique sewing machine and showed us how to make clothes with it. She even took us on an overnight camping trip out to the Angeles National Forest. The only thing I was a little worried about at St. Michael's was that I had to go to chapel every day. Being Jewish, that was totally alien to me, and my ten-year-old mind was a little nervous that God might be angry at me. What was a Jew doing in church? But I grew to love going. The chapel was so quiet and serene that it relaxed me. In all ways, St. Michael's was a sweet school, and to this day I often travel to it in my memory for comfort.

The next school I went to was its opposite. Because St. Michael's went only through sixth grade, my parents had to find a new school for me. I took the entrance exams for several of them, and because of its reputation, my parents chose the Westlake School for Girls in Holmby Hills, California, the sister school to Harvard Boys School. Westlake had been around since the turn of the century, and it was a close community where the headmaster regularly reminded us that we were one and united together. Lots of children of celebrities went there when I did, such as Neil Simon's daughter Nancy; Charlton Heston's daughter Holly; Michael Landon's daughter Leslie; Carol Burnett's daughters Jodie and Carrie Hamilton; and a host of the children of studio executives and producers.

In one of the great ironies of my life, the next year, St. Michael's created a seventh grade, and so if I had gone into kindergarten at age five instead of age four I would have stayed at St. Michael's for another year. I've always thought that might have made a big difference in the rest of the course of my life.