Negotiating with Memory

This is a picture of my father, Robert Fisher, circa 1926, sawing wood in Indiana. A few weeks ago I went to visit him (he is now 94) in Florida. After years of talking about it, I finally interviewed and recorded him for about 30 minutes. He is a very mellow guy, and his epitaph could read, “What you see is what you get”. Hard as I tried to extract long lost stories and juicy details from the past, he seemed unwilling or unable to relate anything beyond facts.
He has had an incredibly interesting life, yet he is humble and unassuming. The experience got me thinking about the nature of memory: not just why and how we remember, but how our selective memories form a narrative of our lives. Do we all edit ourselves to create the persona of the person we want to be? How do we decide what to leave in, what to take out?

While I was pondering some of these questions, I began to read a book called A Fraction of the Whole by Australian novelist Steve Toltz. It’s a long, idiosyncratic, epic saga that reads kind of like a marriage of Dickens and Vonnegut. I came across this paragraph near the beginning of the book:
“Negotiating with memories isn’t easy: how do I choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?.....in any case, mine’s a damned good story, and it’s true.”

How do we tell our life stories? Is blogging the new storytelling? Sometimes I feel like what I'm blogging about isn't "important" enough. But it's all mine, and it's all true.....in my unique life's narrative.