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| Closed, Milwaukee WI, 2011 |
What happens when we can't express it all?
When we can't recall it all?
When we have to make things up?
When we have to let things go?
***This post is the spontaneous intersection of three things I have encountered today:
1. This amazing post in the Draft column of NYT called Forgetting It All.
2. Finally actually reading The Butterfly and The Bell Jar by Jean-Dominique Bauby. I saw the beautiful movie years ago, but I forgot about the book until I read about it recently in Handling the Truth by Beth Kephart (which is an excellent book on memoir, btw). Seeing - feeling how his incredibly, necessarily short and pungent sensory descriptions are so often based in memory because he has lost so much ability to express and even to experience his world directly.
3. A conversation with a friend about whether a modernist angle of working with what we recall from now about then is enough, or if, in memoir, we should go back into source material to try and reproduce it (because I am digging around in my teenaged journals at the moment for memoir purposes).
