My friend Sara O'Leary sent this excerpt from Hilary Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost
Before I went to school there was a time when I was happy, and I want to write down what I remember about that time. The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
We are taught to be chary of early memories. Sometimes psychologists fake photographs in which a picture of their subject, in his or her childhood, appears in an unfamiliar setting, in places or with people whom in real life they have never seen. The subjects are amazed at first but then -- in proportion to their anxiety to please -- they oblige by producing a 'memory' to cover the experience that they have never actually had. I don't know what this shows, except that some psychologists have persuasive personalities, that some subjects are imaginative, and that we are all told to trust the evidence of our senses, and we do it: we trust the objective fact of the photograph, not our subjective bewilderment. It's a trick, it isn't science, it's about our present, not our past.
Sara once mentioned to me in passing that her younger son -- maybe he was in grade five at the time -- was writing his autobiography but couldn't remember much before the age of five or so. And yet, she had noticed that when he was little, he had lots of memories of that time. She suggested that we write Luke's down and I regret to say that we haven't. But this reminds me and I will. Sometimes he astounds me with what he remembers-- and it is all likely to be lost. Thanks, Sara.
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