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The Rememberists
I’ve been a memoirist since childhood. It started with drawing. Pencil gripped in my fist, I scrawled out the things I saw in my head: herds of horses; packs of wolves; a toothy, bat-winged dragon. These creatures did things I witnessed in my dreams and in my waking life, as I tumbled about in the woods or stared spacily at the walls while my mother tried to get my attention. The adults around me hailed my scrawlings as budding creativity, but to me it was only an observational skill. Perhaps they’re one and the same.
Then I learned to read. The pencil in my fist began, clumsily, to form letters. I wrote stories at first, not unlike the stories I buried myself in; Jack London-esque fantasies of wolves and sled-dogs howling deep in the northern woods. The fact that I lived in those very woods, that they were my playground, only lent kindling to the fire of my stories.
Soon enough, though, I developed an inner life that began to pressure me for a different kind of writing. A sort of angsty, antagonistic relationship to myself that forced the words out. My stories gradually morphed into a lifelong journaling habit. Like an addict, I returned to the page every night to unload the vagaries of unrequited teenage love, the heartbreak of hairstyles gone horribly awry, and the unfolding dramas between my mother and myself. “Know thyself,” exhorted Socrates, and though I did not understand this at…
