Use of Memory in Fiction

Last June, USA Today and Amazon best-selling and multi-award-nominated author Connie Berry shared the following essay with her newsletter readers. I immediately wanted to share her thoughts about using memory in a mystery’s plot. (I waited until now because, as you’ll see, Connie talks about June being a nostalgic month, but I find the holiday season to be nostalgic too, with friends and family coming together, remembering times gone by. So as we approach the holiday season, it seems the perfect time to share Connie’s thoughts about memory.) Thank you, Connie, for graciously allowing me to reprint this essay. 

--Barb Goffman 

 

Use of Memory in Fiction

by Connie Berry 

June is a nostalgic month for most people, bringing memories of family gatherings and vacations, high school and college reunions, weddings and anniversaries, and holidays like Fathers’ Day, Flag Day, and Juneteenth.

Last week I had a long phone conversation with my best friend from college. Patty and I haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years—and then only briefly—but she and I were very close during those formative years between 18 and 21.

We knew each other’s high school crushes, and we made up code words no one else understood. We laughed at the same silly jokes, and we pondered some of life’s most important questions.

Once, she stayed up all night with me, typing while I frantically wrote the English paper I had learned about the day before it was due (I'd cut a lot of classes).

We spent almost a year in Europe together, attending classes in Germany and England and driving all over Europe between terms in her little baby blue Karmann Ghia. She taught me to drive a stick shift, and I introduced her to my relatives in Norway.

Long before there was such a thing as the internet, smartphones, or streaming music, we bought a small record player and several albums. We wore those albums out--literally.

It’s fun looking back. It’s also interesting because, as we were sharing our memories (many decades later), we realized that the things we recollected weren’t always the same.

For example, she reminded me of driving in the hills above Monaco. A crazy driver overtook us on a blind curve. If a car had been coming from the opposite direction, we all would have been killed. My response (as she remembered it) was to say, “I refuse to die in Monaco!” I don’t remember that at all.

Then I reminded her that we met an elderly woman in our Monte Carlo pensione who claimed to be of Russian nobility. We thought she was making it up until she escorted us into the inner, private rooms at the famous casino. The attendants bowed to her, and she pointed out other Russian ex-pats— “That’s Count So-and-So.” My friend has no memory of that elderly woman.

Time flies, and memories differ. Writers can use that fact to create complexity and obscure clues in a murder investigation. Police will tell you that eyewitness accounts of a crime differ, even immediately after an event. After years have passed, people may have completely different accounts of something they both witnessed.

Is one of them lying, or is it simply a matter of human psychology? What is it that cements a memory in one person’s mind but not another’s?

Right now, I’m playing with this concept in my WIP. Human brains don’t retain perfect recordings. Instead, they selectively encode information based on individual factors such as emotions, interests, past experiences, and biases.

So how does someone seeking the truth sort through these differences? My protagonist is trying to figure that out. So am I.

Do you have a memory that no one else shares—even those present at the time? I’d love to hear about it!

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Connie Berry, unashamed Anglophile and self-confessed history nerd, is the author of the USA Today and Amazon best-selling and multi-award-nominated Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. Connie is a member of the Crime Writers Association (UK), the Authors’ Guild, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Buckeye Crime Writers, Grand Canyon Writers, and Guppies, of which she is the immediate past president. Her fourth book, The Shadow of Memory, was nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award, and her fifth, A Collection of Lies, was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel. Her latest novel, A Grave Deception, will be released in early December 2025. Connie lives in Ohio and northern Wisconsin with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. You can sign up for her very entertaining monthly newsletter at www.connieberry.com.

The ineluctable modality of the memorable.

            I just came back from a trip to my hometown, King of Prussia, PA, a suburban ring city about fifteen miles outside Philadelphia.         

When we moved there in 1958, it was a somnambulant country town, with cow fields, a couple of gas stations and a single supermarket, now a misnomer, since that A&P could fit into the produce department of an average Whole Foods.  Two buildings held K- 6, and junior and senior high schools.  Now there’re a half dozen elementary schools, and the high school looks like Stanford University, after it opened a satellite campus on Mars.  There’s also a shopping center, purportedly the third largest in the country, and the kind of sprawl William Gibson might have imagined after consuming a handful of magic mushrooms.    

            Though that’s not the point of the essay.  It’s more about memory.  I hadn’t seen the place in a few decades and the transformation was so complete I kept getting lost.  The roadways had changed, as had the route numbers, many of my familiar landmarks were gone, and while place and street names were mostly the same, they were lined with alien structures with strange logos and grotesque encroachments on adjacent properties.  I’d gone forward in the Time Machine, and the Morlocks had learned to live in the sun and taken over. 

            My wife says I have the directional sense of a carrier pigeon.  Before GPS we traveled all over Europe and parts of Asia and Australia with only maps and dead reckoning.  But in this situation, I was constantly befuddled.  Surprisingly, knowing a little is worse than knowing nothing.  Throw in a twenty-plus-year absence, and I was done for, so systemically disoriented I even had trouble finding our hotel room.  My wife asked, “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” 

            Anyone who quibbles over factual errors in a memoir knows nothing about brain science.  Aside from outright fabrication a la George Santos or James Fry, and some argue William Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” (one of my favorite books), if the author is earnestly trying to recall what they experienced, they’re only recounting what they think happened, what they sincerely believe is true, with little chance of getting it right.

               I’ve made peace with this.  I’m simply happy that I remember anything at all, however illusory.  If my brain has put a nicer polish on the experience, that’s fine.  Why not.  The insight that matters for writers is that the line between fiction and non-fiction is pretty fuzzy.  My admiration for the work of historians is boundless, but earnest research won’t make what they're citing less flawed, incomplete, and often wildly inaccurate. 

            What was the best of times for one guy was the worst of times for the guy in the next apartment, or office cubicle, or bunk bed. 

            If you want to take this to the logical extreme, you can invoke quantum mechanics.  Physicists will tell you with a straight face that reality is all just an approximation, a frothy admixture of probabilities determined only by the perspective of the observer, which may conflict with other observations, none of which describe any objective truth.  Heisenberg proved you’ll never know anything with absolute certainty, and no one has yet proven him wrong, even Albert Einstein, though he sure tried (it turns out God does play dice). 

            We’re told to write what we know, which is basically good advice.  All works of fiction are semi-autobiographical, since we mine our own lives for material.  Yet those experiences may or may not have happened.  Your brain has played tricks on you, having you believe things that are distortions at best, and very likely contrivances made in whole cloth without your awareness or approval. 

            So what?  What matters is the quality of the story, the skill with the language and the effect it has on the reader, who has permission to distort all of it to their own liking. 

"Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin." - Barbara Kingsolver

I know I’ve forgotten something, I just don’t remember what it is. 

I said that once, in all sincerity.  I think it adequately sums up the mystery that is memory.  Most of us are really glad to have memories, even ones clouded by misfortune, because they are a testament that we have lived a life.  I’m referring to long-term memory, which has a much different role to play than the short-term variety.  Short-term memory is responsible for me losing countless gloves and sunglasses, a few wallets, where I’ve parked the car, the most recent line of dialog on the TV and the name of the person I was just introduced to.

Speaking of TV, fictional eyewitnesses remember the color of the gunman’s jacket, his slight limp, a noticeable Brooklyn accent and the make and model of his getaway car.  In real life, eyewitnesses can’t do any of these things, which is why they’re mostly disregarded by cops and prosecutors.

People often say, “Aunt Harriet doesn’t remember what she had for breakfast, but she remembers the smell of her mother’s fresh-baked oatmeal cookies and the look of her prom gown.”  Well, of course she can, or at least she can conjure up what she thinks she remembers, and do it with total conviction.  In fact, she’s probably close, but not nearly exact. 

This is because long-term memories are stored in a different, deeper part of the brain.  A short-term memory is only good for a few moments before the brain wants to get rid of it, which it usually does with dispatch.  

It really doesn’t matter if your old memories are precise recreations.  Because it’s more important what you feel when dredging them up again.  This, to me, is the writer’s chore, to hold on to certain emotions and impressions, to later recollect in moments of tranquility, or when overcoming temporary writer’s block to meet a pressing deadline.  

A friend of mine, whom I’ve known since we were roommates in college, likes to play a game called, “Did that actually happen?”  It’s an occasional check-in on old memories, which he usually gets close, but never exactly right, according to my memory of the same event, equally unreliable. 

But as noted, it’s the feelings that matter.  I’ve re-watched beloved movies after a few decades have gone by, and often, usually, they’re not that great.  Better to have retained how they made me feel at the time, because I’m now much older, clogged with accumulated experience (wisdom is too big a word) and concerned with very different matters.  

As with Aunt Harriet, we assemble our long-term memories out of snatches of images and narratives gleaned from the last time we tried to remember what happened.  They are never quite right, but they’re what sticks in the brain as received truth, corrupted files that perpetuate themselves, and continue to warp, over time. 

I have no way of knowing if the recollected emotions are authentic.  Context is usually a good clue.  I saw Cream play at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia when I was about seventeen.  I think it’s a fair bet that I was thrilled to hear Eric Clapton at the height of his guitar-god powers.  I also remember him wearing a black knit beanie and spending part of the concert standing behind his massive wall of Marshall amps.  I remember Ginger Baker looking like a skeleton, seconds away from early death.  He made it to 2019, so he must have just been having a bad week.  Or maybe I don’t remember it correctly.  It doesn’t matter, since I also remember his drumming to be astonishingly complex, exacting and other-worldly. 

The whole night felt great, and that’s all that counts.