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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found
The first several pages of Past Forgetting offer what may be the best set-up for a novel I've ever seen: the narrator awakens in an unfamiliar room to see a strange man beside her. He gently informs her that he is her husband. She loses consciousness and when she wakes up again there's someone she doesn't recognize there. She can tell she's in a hospital; could this man be her doctor? He tells her, patiently, that he is her husband. The next time she wakes up there's a strange man with her. And so on. What gives these pages their extraordinary power is that, of course, the book is not a novel but a memoir. Past Forgetting tells the story of the author's slow recovery from amnesia (brought on by a massive seizure from undiagnosed epilepsy) and her struggles to come back into her own life with almost no memory of the preceding few decades. In so doing, Robinson mounts a fascinating and thought-provoking investigation into just what role memory plays in making us who we are. A question she poses early on - "What do we grasp by instinct in a given moment, and what do we understand by memory?" - resonates throughout as she works her way back into history-laden but unremembered relationships with her husband, her children, her friends, and her writing. As she recovers, she regains patches of memory like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. She can vividly recall her childhood and parts of her early adulthood, but has to be reminded almost daily that her parents are dead; she remembers her children, but not that they have grown up. ("L.A. in 1944 is not particularly helpful if you're living in London in 1980-something," she complains to her doctor. "Especially," he responds, "when it's 1992.") From day to day she forgets her husband's name, and in one of the book's most tender passages he has to tell her the entire story of how they met and fell in love. Every aspect of her identity she must reconstruct from available clues, and the very nature of identity is called into question. "Here's a picture of my father with President Kennedy," Robinson writes. "I guess I'm a Democrat. But I can't remember who's President now. Are my values and political attitudes different now? Will things I used to like to eat be distasteful? Will I love music I used to hate? How much of choice is influenced by association?" Robinson has a terrific gift for language and evokes what must be the bewilderment of amnesia with heartbreakingly precise strokes. She has to learn again even the most basic facts about herself, as in an early scene in the hospital: "I'm slicing a peach, carefully. It works better with my left hand. It's as if this hand and I greet each other like old war buddies." Her descriptions of what it feels like to have petit mal seizures are impressively clear and vivid, even while her wry sense of humor regarding these recurrent seizures ("Do all native Californians have this seismic tendency?") tempers the devastation she presents. Gradually, as her memory strengthens, Robinson shifts her focus from recovery to more standard memoir fare, including her upbringing and family life. Even here, she has remarkable material to work with. Her father, Dore Schary, ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1948 to 1956, and her childhood was consequently peopled with movie stars, many of whom appear in the book. Cary Grant and Robert Redford are among those who sit down with her to discuss old times; Barbra Streisand breezes through; Dennis Hopper reminisces about Los Angeles in the 1960s. These celebrity cameos are certainly glamorous, but Robinson lingers too long over Hollywood gossip - which, while she can legitimately claim it as part of her story, distracts from the far more riveting examination of memory, and what it is to live without it. It is Robinson's return to the craft of writing - which more than one doctor told her she'd never be able to do again - that becomes the driving narrative of the second half of the book. We see Robinson exercise her brain like a muscle, employing mnemonic aides from Cicero's "memory theater" to Post-It notes to keep track of her characters, which stories she's told before, and which details belong to which scene. She gathers a group of other writers around her to meet once a week for mutual support. She chronicles at length her difficulties and frustrations with her work, although she does note that writing was difficult and frustrating even with her memory intact. All her testimony regarding her exertions, though, only reinforces in the reader's mind a sense of what a great achievement Past Forgetting is. That Robinson can write at all deserves respect and admiration. That she has produced a work as compelling and intricate as this one, we can only be grateful. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your book? Emily Banner recently completed her MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in western Massachusetts, where she's working on her first novel.
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