“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither . . . The most ordinary movement in the world . . . may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim.”
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
The first album I ever bought was Ace of Base’s The Sign. While I have trouble recalling what I did last week, the second I hear the relentless reggae beat of “All That She Wants,” I am propelled back in time. It’s 1993 and all anyone can talk about is Rodney King or the World Trade Center bombing. But I’m a kid so I’m dancing in my best friend’s room. Her daybed is decked out in a frothy pink coverlet I have always envied, and a clear phone just like Clarissa Darling’s preens on her desk, its curly cord trailing like a contrail to the jack in the wall.
My nightstand has a well-read stack of Baby-Sitters Club books and my recently widowed father is refusing to let me see Jurassic Park with the rest of my friends (because it’s rated PG-13), which is truly the most mortifying thing that has ever happened to me. It’s all there—every last detail, down to the dust motes I watched drift across the family room while my babysitter watched Dances with Wolves on repeat from the blue velveteen La-Z-Boy parked in the corner by our fireplace.
Neuroscientists call this tendency to have enhanced recollections of one’s adolescence as the reminiscence bump. For writers, especially those interested in the personal essay, memories from late childhood to young adulthood shine the brightest in our adult recollections. No wonder literary journals and therapist couches alike teem with nonfiction stories from these formative years. To sift through this cache of memories and create a narrative net that pulls others into their world—that is the job of the personal essayist.
Perhaps the most iconic literary reminiscence bump happens in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s bump, like most people’s, is triggered by a sensual experience in the present day. For him, it’s biting into a teatime madeleine:
“No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place . . . I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”
Proust then waxes long on the little cakes his Aunt Léonie used to serve, her “old grey house,” and the streets where he ran errands as a young boy. A mental map of his childhood emerges as distinct and real as an actual map, “all from [his] cup of tea.”
Proust’s madeleine scene is considered the touchstone moment in a touchstone text. When I teach, I use it to introduce the concept of an essay’s “occasion,” or the reason for an essay’s existence. Proust conjures a memory palace out of a few drops of tea and cookie crumbs; in doing so, he invites the reader to forge their own personal time machine.
However, what Proust initially experiences is more precisely called involuntary retrieval memory: when something in a person’s everyday life evokes a memory without conscious effort. It’s the involuntary memory that triggers a reminiscence bump, which then unlocks the time warp effect that makes the past feel so present. “Those [past] moments . . . can still be more real than the present moment,” writes Proust’s contemporary and great admirer, Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” which attempts to reconcile why some memories stick over others and why she feels compelled to use her words to scaffold and shape something so nebulous as memory. Woolf continues, dreaming of a future “device” that would allow her to accurately “tap” back into forgotten memories and their accompanying intense emotions:
“I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen . . . I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen into the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start.”
For Woolf, the past is both omnipresent and coiled within her like potential energy. It waits, its untapped power vibrating beneath the humdrum “cotton wool” of everyday life. But once plugged into, the memory becomes immediately kinetic, hurtling through time and space to collide with the present tense. This time travel effect is what makes the reminiscence bump such a powerful tool in the personal essay.
Of course, the flipside of involuntary memory and reminiscence bumps is what pioneering psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus called the forgetting curve. His self-experiments showed that newly learned information is unstable and highly susceptible to degradation within the first twenty-four hours, if not reinforced by purposeful review. Intentional narrative, or storytelling, is what allows the memory to stabilize. Today, we have a more poetic, if unfiltered, term for the forgetting curve: memory decay.
According to her former writing student Alexander Chee, Annie Dillard once said, “You can invent the details that don’t matter . . . At the edges. You cannot invent the details that matter.” I suspect Proust experienced this rush of invention when he drafted the madeleine scene. We now know that earlier versions of this scene used stale bread, a hard biscuit, and then buttered bread in lieu of the sponge cake immortalized in the final version. Did Proust’s evolution from stale bread to buttery cake constitute a moral failing, i.e., did he flat out lie? Did he forget the true trigger? Or did petit madeleine just sound better? Which details are considered to be “at the edges” and therefore acceptable to the auspices of invention is left up to the writer, who can wield this power responsibly or irresponsibly.
Chee elaborates on Dillard’s dictum: “Your memories are not just unreliable, they are full of research holes.” In creative nonfiction, this is the space where invention comes in to patch the holes left by imperfect memory—though Chee encourages his writing students to use research to fill in the blanks, rather than wholesale imagination. For instance, the red wildflowers he remembers from his childhood in Maine become fully fleshed out after he reads a book about the flora and fauna of Maine. Instead of vague red flowers, data allows them to bloom into the specificity of “orange hawkweed . . . Also called Devil’s Paintbrush,” which is “so much better than ‘red flower.’”
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“Children don’t forget, children don’t forget,” obsesses Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, another contemporary of both Proust and Woolf, laments through his Little Prince: “All grown-ups were once children . . . but only a few remember it.” Forgetting creates a crack in time and memory where imagination takes root. It invites moments of wonder, which allow a writer the chance to consider what might have been, if they remembered with exactness. Like Chee, I believe that these moments in nonfiction are most effective when reinforced by research. Through researching, hazy memories can be strengthened into something that feels as real as the present day. Data can anchor a personal narrative in time and history and give concrete shape to a writer’s internal landscape. Externalizing the interior through specificity—like Chee’s orange hawkweed—is what gives the reader something to hold on to in the here and now.
There are risks in all of this, of course, like conjuring false memories. But there is a keen difference between unintentional false memories and intentional literary hoaxes, such as James Frey’s infamous memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Where Dillard nudges writers to examine, or sometimes imagine, what exists “at the edges” of a given memory, an ethical contract still exists in the realm of personal essays. A reader can tolerate some creative liberties, when they trust that the writer is not inventing things wholesale under the guise of nonfiction. Even still, unreliable narrators are true to life. We are always curating the narratives we share, or choose not to share; oftentimes these stories have little relation to what actually happened. One of my most shared childhood traumas happened when my older brother forced my little brother to throw his blankie into our fireplace. Every time I told the story, I could smell the acrid smoke that billowed into our family room when the blanket ignited then dissolved into a pile of ashes. The story was pivotal in my self-narrative; I used it whenever I tried to explain the estranged family dynamic that emerged after my mother’s untimely death. Whenever I shared it, I experienced the same agony I felt as a child watching this fire sacrifice play out. After I graduated college, I asked my older sister if she remembered this life-defining moment. “Of course I do,” she said. She paused for a very long time before saying, “It’s from the movie Mr. Mom.”
The minute she said it, I could suddenly recall the towheaded child actor hugging his blanket to his chest before tossing it into the movie set’s roaring fireplace. This familial tragedy never happened in real life, much less to my beloved little brother, but in my mind it became the backbone of my family’s dark origin story. One could argue that this is one of those important details Dillard says not to invent, but trauma does strange things, often splices fiction into truth seamlessly. It makes me wonder how much of my childhood happened at all like I remembered. It is also why I constantly review my version of things with my siblings’. The aggregation of our memories creates something closer to the truth.
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My kids roll their eyes whenever I blast “The Sign” on Spotify. Little do they know that their middle-aged mother has performed the impossible: While they halfheartedly bob their heads to the driving beat, I have zipped back in time where the sun casts an amber halo over my ninth birthday party. All my friends are splashing in my pool and we are laughing and screaming to Swedish pop. We know every single word like it’s our religion and there, with water glinting like shards of stained glass, it feels holy, sacramental, in the way that childhood can only be when perceived from the long horizon of adult memory.
Boros, Adam. “The Forgetting Curve.” The Decision Lab, https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/psychology/forgetting-curve
Chee, Alexander. “Annie Dillard and the Writing Life.” The Morning News, 16 Oct. 2009, https://themorningnews.org/annie-dillard-and-the-writing-life/.
Chee, Alexander. “Research Your Life.” The Center for Fiction, 16 Dec. 2016, https://centerforfiction.org/writing-tools/research-your-life/ .
Munawar, Khadeeja, et. al. “Understanding the reminiscence bump: A systemic review.” PLOS One, 18 Dec. 2018, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6289446/.
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way. Translated by Lydia Davis, edited by Christopher Prendergast, vol. 1, Penguin Classics, 2003.
Willsher, Kim. “In search of lost toast: Paris show reveals origins of Proust’s madeleines.” The Guardian, 10 Dec. 2022,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/10/in-search-of-lost-toast-paris-show-reveals-origins-of-prousts-madeleinesals-origins-of-prousts-madeleines.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Vintage Classics, 2004.
Amy Lee Scott’s When the World Explodes: Essays (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press) won the 2023 Gournay Prize. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her illustrated essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, and Tin House Online. Other essays have been noted in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Essays series. Adopted from South Korea as an infant, and raised in suburban Los Angeles, she now lives with her family and tabby cat in Southeast Michigan. Learn more at amyleescott.com.
This essay is part of our “Staging Style” series. This quarterly craft series, edited by NER’s Leslie Sainz, presents innovative writers, translators, and critics articulating the influences and impulses that have sharpened their thinking and writing minds.