The body's back door to memory
Writing about early memories is more about conjuring the senses than recalling complete stories.
I can feel the warmth of my mother’s lap under my legs, the vibration of her voice against my back. I’m jostled by her movements as she gestures and talks to the others crowded into this tiny, wood-panelled space, her arm lightly encircling my waist, but I barely notice any of this.
I’m fixated on an object in front of me that I don’t quite understand. A huge aluminum pot is producing voluminous clouds of starchy steam so thick with delicious aroma I almost feel that I’m drinking it through my tiny nostrils.
A dark-haired woman lifts slippery, translucent strands high above the pot and lets them drop back into the bubbling water, over and over again for what seems like an eternity. I don’t know what I’m seeing and smelling, but I know I want to eat it. I am ravenous. Nothing exists for me but those silvery noodles.
Over the years, flickering flashbacks to this moment have snapped me back in time again and again. The sense memory of the smell of the steam and my hunger for those noodles remains sharp decades later. But my memory of the event itself is scanty. Who is the woman at the stove, and what is this tiny kitchen? Why does this entire scene feel “watery”? Was it even real?
I chalked it up as a dream until I described it to my mother years later and she filled in the blanks. When I was a toddler, my family stopped over in Tahiti on our way to New Zealand. We’d been invited to lunch on a sailboat belonging to some friends of my parents, and everybody was starving after a long morning of sightseeing. According to my mom, those glass noodles really did take ages to cook. I now know that this is my earliest memory. I was eighteen months old.
Me in Tahiti in my favorite bathing suit, the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot bikini that I never wanted to outgrow because I loved the song that my mother sang about it.
When we try to write about the distant past, we often start by recalling a particular event - a story about something that happened - and then go hunting for details to bring it to life. But the juiciest details can be very hard to access because they live in a different place inside us. When we go into our memories through the “front door” of our mental narratives, we wind up telling what we know, rather than showing what we experienced. Our anecdotes come out as dry and hollow as an empty shoebox.
Writing about early memories is more about conjuring the senses than recalling complete stories. If we can find our way into the past through the back door of the body, it’s possible to surface those fragmented sense-memories that live on the ocean floor of our consciousness.
My writing coach Lisa Weinert gave me an immensely useful prompt for this, called “I Remember”. Here’s how it works.
First, choose a setting or situation that you want to explore. It can be as specific as that summer you spent on the farm, or as broad as your family dynamic.
Set a timer for twenty minutes, and free write a series of lines, each starting with the words “I remember…” And then just free associate, and see what comes up. Let your body lead you into the past.
You might remember a shrill, high laugh, a bitter taste, dust motes dancing in slanting sunlight, a fragment of a whispered conversation, the sting of a slap, or the whorls of a rug.
From there, it’s sometimes possible to reconstruct a scene from the inside out. The sense memory of a bloody knee caked with grit leads you to recall summer evenings spent roller-skating in the alleyway, and that leads you to the day the neighborhood bully pushed you over and your sister shoved him back in your defence. Now you have a story with visceral detail that can show, not tell, the dimensions of your relationship.
And sometimes there is so much truth conveyed by those tiny details, you may not need much of a narrative at all to bring the past to life on the page. You might only need a cramped sailboat galley filled with starchy steam and the solid, shifting warmth of your mother’s lap.
As a chronically verbose person, I was astonished by the amount of story that can pack itself into those thin lines. Here’s the product of my experiment with “I Remember”, in case you’re curious. (TW: It’s a recollection of grief.)
Have you tried the “I Remember” prompt? I’d love to read what came up for you.
If you like this prompt, consider getting yourself into Lisa Weinert’s world. She is the founder of Narrative Healing, a community and set of programs focused on writing personal narrative as a therapeutic practice. She’s also just an amazing human and a deeply talented, empathic coach.
Lisa’s going to be leading a workshop on Narrative Healing at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY from July 17 - 22. I’m going! Here are the deets if you want to join us.
xo
Maggie