libkatem's review against another edition
4.0
Amazing, honestly. I love Hampl's approach and style. It's truly unique.
taitmckenzie's review against another edition
3.0
One point that Patricia Hampl raises in “I Could Tell You Stories,” which I think is essential to keep in mind when working with autobiographical material, is that memory is not necessarily reliable or true. In the piece “Memory and Imagination,” Hampl recalls a memory of her first piano lesson, down to very specific sensory details, and then admits afterwards that what she had written was a lie. As she puts it: “no memoirist writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just, memory” (Hampl, 24). And yet at the same time it seems that there is very much an expectation that autobiographical writing should be factually true. I recently read of a WWII autobiography slated for movie adaptation that was discovered to be ‘not entirely factual,’ which resulted in a scandal and cancellation of the deal. The article suggested that this happens regularly, too regularly for the popularity of this kind of writing. Hampl suggests that “a reader has a right to expect a memoir to be as accurate as the writer’s memory can make it” (Hampl, 29), or at least that’s the assumption. Though why this is the case I’m not sure.
I instead agree that memory is unreliable and leads to invention. If you think about it, it’s not like memory is a faithful recording of past events, the way vinyl or film are. The mind is a malleable medium and works through the ambiguities of meaning. When we remember we can only approach the past from our present vantage point, which necessarily means the memory will be different from when it occurred, both in detail and meaning. Even though the details and importance of Hampl’s interaction with the woman in “Red Sky in the Morning” may have been such when the event first happened, they read now more as a story. The details and meaning may have changed in her mind over the years, becoming more focused on those elements worth retelling. When I read the sentence about this woman “drifting off with the secret heaviness of experience into the silence where stories live their real lives, crumbling into the loss we call remembrance” (Hampl, 20), I was immediately reminded of a favorite line from one of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that I think succinctly captures this contradiction in the function of memory: “We had the experience but missed the meaning,/ And approach to the meaning restores the experience/ In a different form.” I suppose the challenge with memory is that meaning is not something we can ever posit beforehand, it always comes about after the facts. As Hampl puts it, returning to her lie about the importance of the nun in “Memory and Imagination:” “I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know” (Hampl, 27). Working with my own memories I’ve found a similar experience, I write what I thought was true, and then remember that it was different, and yet clearer, richer of detail and meaning. But it takes starting with what you think is true in order to get into that deeper reality of memory.
I instead agree that memory is unreliable and leads to invention. If you think about it, it’s not like memory is a faithful recording of past events, the way vinyl or film are. The mind is a malleable medium and works through the ambiguities of meaning. When we remember we can only approach the past from our present vantage point, which necessarily means the memory will be different from when it occurred, both in detail and meaning. Even though the details and importance of Hampl’s interaction with the woman in “Red Sky in the Morning” may have been such when the event first happened, they read now more as a story. The details and meaning may have changed in her mind over the years, becoming more focused on those elements worth retelling. When I read the sentence about this woman “drifting off with the secret heaviness of experience into the silence where stories live their real lives, crumbling into the loss we call remembrance” (Hampl, 20), I was immediately reminded of a favorite line from one of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that I think succinctly captures this contradiction in the function of memory: “We had the experience but missed the meaning,/ And approach to the meaning restores the experience/ In a different form.” I suppose the challenge with memory is that meaning is not something we can ever posit beforehand, it always comes about after the facts. As Hampl puts it, returning to her lie about the importance of the nun in “Memory and Imagination:” “I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know” (Hampl, 27). Working with my own memories I’ve found a similar experience, I write what I thought was true, and then remember that it was different, and yet clearer, richer of detail and meaning. But it takes starting with what you think is true in order to get into that deeper reality of memory.
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