A Slightly Different Lense

My book club just discussed We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. It was a fascinating read and a spirited discussion.

I don't want to really describe the book because doing so would be a real "spoiler" for anyone who wants to read it - and I highly recommend it! But much of the discussion last week had to do with memories and childhood and which childhood memories are real and which are "filtered" by time in some way. And why do members of the same family remember the same event so differently?

Some of our conversation, and the book, have been spinning around in my head all week. And then I had a fun visit with my sister and brother-in-law over the weekend and was again struck by some of our memories being a little "different".  My one book club friend (who has a much larger family with several siblings) says when she is with her brothers and sisters and they're reminiscing she sometimes thinks "did we grow up in the same family!?"

I think it's pretty natural to remember things our own way - we are each individuals, different personalities, each growing up at a certain "place" in the family (youngest, oldest, middle, after-thought). And we experience the past our own way - if something happened when I was sixteen I will "see" it differently than my sister might - she would have been eight at the time. So neither memory is "wrong" - just our own. It can make for some pretty funny conversations.

Growing up we were close to our two cousins, and we spent a lot of time together. One cousin close to my age, and the other closer to my sister. When I get back together with my "closest" cousin she and I will laugh that our younger siblings have completely different memories of some things that are very clear to us oldsters.

There was a quote on page 247 of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves that I found fascinating. (Partly because I was a psychology major in college I guess.) The author says: "...I wasn't shaking because of anything happening now or anything that might happen next. I was completely buried in the unremembered, much disputed, fantasyland of the past.

Sigmund Freud has suggested that we have no early childhood memories at all. What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering."

So was the author saying we all "reinterpret" our past?? Does my "screen" make my memories "wrong"? Hmmmm…..I don't know just how many of Freud's theories are still accepted but this one does sort of strike a cord for me. Maybe screens can be helpful….filtering isn't all bad. Nice to remember the good times and maybe filter some of the not-so-good. (Have to ask my two kids what filters they have in place - or never mind, I probably don't want to know.)

Anyway - book club was terrific last week, as was my visit with my sister - and I'm still pondering some of the things we discussed. I guess that's one of the best results of gathering with friends/family who have unique perspectives and comments to contribute to the conversation.