If Memory Serves - A Memoirist on Writing About The Past

How do we remember our past? What stories do we tell ourselves that become ingrained as memories even though the stories might not be real? 

Author, memoirist, and septuagenarian Jonathan Lerner sits down with Jane Trombley to reveal discoveries about his teen years outside Washington DC as he researched for his latest memoir, Performance Anxiety. Some of the stories he recalled didn’t quite line up with reality, a discovery that caught him by surprise. 

Jonathan also talks about his earlier memoir, Swords in the Hands of Children, chronicling his early adult years as he dropped out of college, joined the anti-war movement and the militant Weather Underground organization. It took him nearly thirty years to process the experience, and gain enough distance to write a successful memoir, despite easy access to public archival material, early manuscripts and recorded interviews with former colleagues. Swords was published in early 2017. 

What is the upshot of delving into long-ago memories? As Jonathan says, “The result can be a kind of peacemaking with yourself and self-forgiveness, (and) maybe forgiveness of someone else.”

We close with some pro tips for all us amateur memoirists looking to capture our own stories. Have a listen.

Show links:

Memoirs:

Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid

Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary

Website:   Jonathan Lerner

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Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

“Almost everybody I know of our age has something from their past that they're trying to work out. And I wouldn't suggest that everybody try to write a book about it, but I think if you try to excavate the memories in some kind of disciplined way, and try to verify them or blow them up, the result can be a kind of peacemaking with yourself and self-forgiveness, maybe forgiveness of someone else.”

That's the voice of Jonathan Lerner, a friend and my guest today. At 76, as a memoirist and novelist, Jonathan excavated his adolescent past in his latest book, Performance Anxiety. There he examines his teen life in suburban Washington, D.C., in the heyday of the 1960s.

I'm Jane Trombley. Many of us might dream of writing about our past to preserve our legacy or share with younger generations what it was like to live in a pre-digital era. Back when our pasts were in our memories rather than forever etched on social media.

And that's the challenge. Which triggers help us remember our past? What do we remember and with what accuracy?

There's considerable scientific research going on these days about memory and the aging brain, but that's not what this episode is about. Ours is a non-scientific perspective about memory and reconstructing all the bits that shaped our lives, even when memory doesn't match reality. 

Welcome, Jonathan. So why did you write this book?


I think at this stage of life, we all seem to want to settle up with ourselves, to make peace with something that's disturbing, to understand or to forgive ourselves. I've been thinking about John Didion's famous line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

You know, I had a somewhat fraught adolescence. In some ways, it was very good, very privileged. I had a lot of freedom.

I went to a wonderful school. I was also fighting being gay in a time before Stonewall when there was no open way to be open. And I lost my mother when I was 16 and a senior in high school.

And that had some unhappy repercussions for the family. So, I had mostly good feelings about my adolescence when I thought back about it. I hadn't really thought it through.

So, that was the reason. I wanted to defuse it, understand it, and tell a story.

And tell a story you did. Performance Anxiety examines everything that you experienced in those turbulent high school years, turbulent for everybody. And you had some high mountains to climb.

Something that I kept bumping into in the course of writing was that memory is fluid and memory is fungible. And you remember this incident differently. I was trying to write a straight, honest memoir that was accurate.

But I had to confront the idea of what is accuracy when you're remembering. There were a number of things that happened where I would tell an anecdote and then try to corroborate it, talking to somebody who was a friend of mine at the time, who was maybe present when it happened, and discover that his memory was different than mine. Maybe not contradictory, but different emphasis, different details.

There were things I realized that I had remembered for my whole life, really important things that turned out to not have ever happened.

Can you give an example? 

Yes. My father was in the Foreign Service. We lived in Taiwan for a couple of years when I was in elementary school.

I loved being there. I had a great time. Normally in the Foreign Service, you have a two-year tour of duty, then a couple of months of home leave, and then you go back for a second tour.

We didn't go back. But I remembered that we intended to go back, and only were coming on home leave briefly. In fact, I remembered the return airline tickets.

I remembered holding them in my hand. And I remember this painful afternoon in civics class watching the clock tick on the wall, down to the moment when the plane was going to leave National Airport with us on the way back to Taiwan. 

So, one of the sources of information in this book is a scrapbook of letters my mother had written back to her friends, written from Taiwan.

And I read them dozens and dozens of times. After I had written a whole passage in the book about my miserable afternoon, the day we were supposed to go back to Taiwan, for some reason, I went back to the letters, and for the first time, although I had read the letters dozens of times, I see that six months earlier, my mother had written to the effect that we were not going to return. So in other words, the tickets had never been printed.

I had never held them in my hand. I had been miserable in this new school that I had just come into late in the year where I didn't know anybody, and I had been missing Taiwan. But I had been missing Taiwan so much that I crafted this falsehood and remembered it as a real memory. 

So in the book, I described my encounter with the actual fact of my mother's letter.

There you are with a fabricated memory that had a lot of power over me. It was real to me. So what's accurate? What's true?

I guess the factual truth is that as evidenced by your mother's letters, the family was not going to return.

Right. That was the factual truth. But there was the power of the memory, the experience that I remember, which couldn't have happened the way I remembered it.

Right. The tricks of memory.

The tricks of memory, exactly. And the unreliability of memory.

Memory is a trickster.

That seems a little unfair to you. I guess it made you feel better because you had this memory of you were going back and then that memory was dashed.

Then it made me feel worse. I mean, you know, I can conjecture psychological reasons for it. Maybe because I was so unhappy in this new school situation, maybe I had to create this falsehood as a way to rationalize being unhappy. Because what I was really unhappy about was that I was being bullied for being gay. And I'm not a psychologist, so that's a possible theory. 

But to get back to what I was saying, we remember in order to settle up with ourselves, the process of writing the book, including things like this where I discovered something that was inaccurate in memory, was a kind of freeing experience.

And I'm more at peace with my adolescence having written the book. And I think a lot of people of our age are concerned with things that happened in the past, whether it's adolescence or young adulthood or something to do with your children. Or I mean, almost everybody I know of our age has something from their past that they're trying to work out.

And I wouldn't suggest that everybody try to write a book about it. But I think if you try to excavate the memories in some kind of disciplined way and try to verify them or blow them up, the result can be a kind of peacemaking with yourself and self-forgiveness, maybe forgiveness of someone else.

And then how did this exercise help you forgive yourself?

Having written the book, I see myself as a complicated, conflicted person and I see that that was completely understandable given my circumstances. I also see that almost everybody else, or maybe everybody else, whoever went through adolescence also felt conflicted and challenged. So, you know, in some sense, I'm not so special.

That's a form of forgiveness. I'm just another person trying to live. But also, I forgive myself.

For example, in the incident, I described about sitting in class and being miserable because we weren't going back to Taiwan, I can make light of it. I mean, it hurt then. I think now it's funny that 60 years later, I was still believing that that happened until I came across a passage I had willfully not seen in the dozens of times I've read my mother's letters.

Your mother plays a really big role in your book. It's a very fond memory of yours. It's a touchstone for you, but it's a very touching point of contact for the reader because she comes alive.

You shared a lot of passions, and it's clear that in your professional life as a writer and architecture critic, the germ of that was perhaps accompanying your mother on house-viewing trips, even if you really weren't in the market for a house. She enjoyed seeing houses, and you were delighted to tag along, and it sounds like it helped nurture that interest. And if you wouldn't mind, I would love to have you read this passage about… Well, you set it up.

About another questionable memory, let's say, or another magical memory. I'm not sure how to exactly characterize it. We can look for that after I read it.

So I found a picture of my mother I'd never seen before when she was quite young, probably in her early 20s and maybe just married. And here's what I wrote: 

I had never seen this photo of young mom until recently.

It reminded me of another spur-of-the-moment jaunt I made in that blue Studebaker in 1965, a few months after her death. It was a mild spring day. I suddenly craved irresistibly to see the ocean.

I remember bumping into somebody in the school atrium and recruiting him to agree that we should immediately get the hell out of there. We cruised across Chesapeake Bay to Rehoboth Beach two and a half hours away. I recall that the person who came with me was my friend John, although he doesn't remember it.

We, I, and John, or whoever, were sitting at a picnic table by the beach eating ice cream cones. When at a distance, I saw my mother. Not mom, as she had been in the recent past, gray and bloated and dying, but as she appears in that old photo, svelte, pretty, vital, young, younger even than in the picture, like my age at the time, a teenager.

I watched this person for a minute. I looked away. I looked back and she was gone.

I just saw my mother. I muttered to whomever.

You remembered that. Is that the magic of memory?

I mean, it wasn't really my mother because my mother had died a few months before. Was it even a person who resembled her because she was there and then she wasn't there? I suppose you could call it a hallucination.

And I think you could call false memories hallucinations. They're sort of hallucinations in the past tense. It was something I needed and wanted to have happen.

Obviously I wanted a visitation from my mother. What was it? It's a memory now that it happened.

At the time, I'm not, I wouldn't call it a memory then.

It's interesting, though, that you do remember it clearly.

And who you think you were with, certainly where it happened. And it also has to do with a person who was so influential and a source of kindness in your troubled adolescence, a source of fun and a shared interest. And it's a beautifully written passage. So I thank you for reading it. 

I'm also wondering, because a lot of us, as we grow older, look to siblings or cousins or our contemporaries who shared our path and grew up alongside us. I know that you have two older siblings, a brother and a sister, and then a younger brother in your nuclear family.

Sometimes brothers and sisters can confirm your personal history and sometimes they offer a contrarian view, “Oh no, that didn't happen.” Did you fact-check this stuff with them?

The book has just come out and none of them has read it yet. I could picture us sometime in the near future, the four of us sitting around talking about it and how different my memories might have been. But I often fact-check specific things.

I did that with some friends from the time. And I think that's a way to, if you're trying to work with memory, that's a way to triangulate, corroborate or challenge the memories that you have. 

I only asked them when I was writing very specific kinds of details so that we didn't get into any big, bigger things.

And we'll see if we do. It could be good to be a fly on the wall.

Yeah. The Lerner children get down.

The Lerner children get down.

I don't know. It sounds like a Netflix series.

It could be.

We'll be right back to talk with Jonathan about a very different memoir he wrote, chronicling his early adult years. Plus, some tips for all of us amateur memoirists, thinking about recapturing our own stories.

Mid-point break

Jonathan, I wanted to circle back, because as a memoirist, this isn't your first rodeo. You wrote a book prior that dealt with a period of your life that closely followed your adolescence.

The other one is called Swords in the Hands of Children, and it starts more or less when I'm in college, but I was only in college for two years. I dropped out and was a member of the Weather Underground, which is a militant, very ideological, clandestine organization. It's kind of interesting that the process of writing that was less smooth than the process of writing is, partly I'm older and I'm a better writer now.

I wrote that three different times. I had a novel published in 1989, and when the publisher realized that I'd had this personal history in the Weather Underground, he gave me a contract to write a memoir about it. It was only 12 or 15 years after the period I would be writing about and I wrote several versions of a book that were all un-publishable.

I didn't have enough distance. I wasn't ready at that time to do the thing that I've been talking about, settling up myself using... reflection.

Yeah, I really wasn't. And I was still angry at myself. I'm still angry at some of my ex-comrades.

And then, in 2016, a publisher who I had worked with before suggested to me that he would publish what he called a “contemplative memoir” about my experience in the Weather Underground. And at that time, I was 30 years older. That history was way behind me.

I didn't feel this kind of emotional charge writing it. It was published early in 2017. For the failed versions 15 years earlier, I had done a lot of research, and I still had my manuscripts.

And I had gone around and actually taped interviews with some of my former comrades and people who knew us at the time. So I had a lot of material. Plus, there's archival historical material because these were public events, political events.

So in a sense, I had already done the research. When I finally was able to write the book, it was a breeze and I really enjoyed it. And I kind of started to think maybe my real metier is to be a memoirist.

And that was actually very similar to how I felt writing Performance Anxiety, even though I hadn't previously written versions of it.  I had the same sort of feeling of enough distance, enough self-confidence, both in my skill as a writer and also just in who I am. Lots of the things that I write about in Performance Anxiety that were upsetting at the time, or were triggering at the time or whatever, have been put to rest anyway. Writing the book gave me a chance to do a global look at myself as a kid and as a teenager, and piece it all together.

But it still comes back question of what's exactly true. I made a good story that's a good read. Therefore, I had to be selective and I left a lot of things out.

I didn't consciously invent anything to fill in. But when we are excavating memory, we are creating story. And even if you're not a writer and you're not going to publish what you produce, you are going to create a story that works as a story.

So it's going to have character development and plot and tension and release and the things that make stories good.

And even if it's only telling the story at the high school reunion or in a gathering of old friends, you're going to have that story arc in your memory. The backstory actually gave you kind of a leg up, and there was less to reconstruct as opposed to Performance Anxiety where you were taking, in contrast, almost an archaeological expedition.

Yeah. I mean, looking at hundreds of photographs, letters, going back and looking at images of the kinds of ships and airplanes we traveled around the world on when we went to Taiwan. Looking on Street View at the neighborhood I grew up in and at the houses of my friends and at the routes I used to take to get from my house to their houses.

Looking for the school I was happy in, which I discovered on Street View. Although the building was brand new when I went to school there in 1964, the building is gone, which was really a shock.

That had to be a little unsettling.

It was very unsettling.

Because it was such an important part of your life. And from my reading of the memoir, a very happy part.

Yeah. And intellectually stimulating, and it was very intimate. I did have the yearbook that we put out in my senior year, and I spent a lot of time looking through the yearbook. It's almost all photographs, photographs taken by the students.

So some of them are really bad and some of them are quite good. And they're very vivid to me. I can't remember a lot of their names, but I can look at them on the page, and they're alive now, 16 years old.

That really helped, having that. So if you are undertaking this kind of exploration of some part of your past, I think no matter what it is, there are objective, tangible things you can find and use as spurs to your memory. Photos, news events in the time, the music of the time, the movies that you saw then, if you watch them again now, they will bring things back.

You also mentioned technology that certainly wasn't available then and provides, I think, great context, and that's Street View. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because that's something anybody can use, and it's, I would think, a big jog.

It is slightly unsettling in one way, which is that 60 years later, the trees are all much bigger and houses seem much smaller, which people always say when they go back to the house, they grew up and it seems much smaller. I mean, I've spent a lot of time on it, and I discovered strange things. For example, we lived in a suburb called Chevy Chase, which is adjacent to another suburb called Bethesda.

My friends lived in both. My teenage years were spent in both, and I was given a car when I was 16 in order to drive myself downtown to school. So I was very mobile, and this is the turf I was mobile in, and I thought I knew it. And there was a really important piece of it that I didn't know.

Would it have mattered if you had known it at the time, though? I mean, here you were in your Studebaker, buzzing about. Would it have mattered?

I don't know if it would have mattered. I mean, there was a group of young Jewish couples who eventually founded the first synagogue in Montgomery County, Maryland, before they formalized as a synagogue, called themselves the BCC Group. So it seemed like we were all one thing.

And in a sense, you can look at the map, and then you can go into Street View, and you can actually put yourself on any street, and you can twirl yourself around, and you can look at the front of the houses, and some of them aren't there anymore. Some of them have been remodeled and are unrecognizable. Some of them appear to be exactly as they were. So that brought a lot back.

And just to be clear, when you've been talking about Street View…

It's a feature of Google Maps.

So not many of us are going to, well, have the discipline, the talent, or the need to commit our memoirs, as you have. But a lot of us, particularly with an interest in family history, would like to dig around a little bit. And you've mentioned Street View, photographs, the music of the time, movies of the time.

Relatives, people who have known you your whole life.

If anybody is going to undertake this, or I'm going to look into my family history and try to piece it all together, what advice would you have?

You always want to create boundaries around the project. You don't want it to spill over in every possible direction and never able to be completed. So I think it's good to have a, to start with a question that gives you some boundaries.

Let's say, I felt really bad when I first went to college because of something. I didn't feel welcomed in my dorm. I didn't feel, you know, some, if you can name a problem and then give it parameters, either chronological parameters like the years of college or the early years of your marriage or your earliest childhood.

And the corollary of this is you have to understand that not every memory or fact is going to be that germane to your pursuit. I mean, if you can put in a sentence what it is you're looking for, and use that as a sort of reference point and refer back to, it'll help you decide what's relevant and what’s useful

And then I think on all those other, all those other sort of objective external, aides memoir as they say in French, photos, letters, talking to people who are there, Street View.

Yeah, your sports trophies, if you had them.

You know, for me, getting this ‘56 Studebaker when I was 16 years old was pretty major and I spent a lot of time looking at pictures of 1956 Studebakers. I found one that is not the one I had, but it's exactly the model in the same color.

Did you keep the license plate by chance?

No, but I can remember the number. It was, let's see, we had two Studebakers. Mine was EY2843 and the other one was EY2842.

Why can I remember that? Don't know. You asked me what my license plate is now, I have no idea.

That's the magic of memory. We remember the really important stuff.

It's also the thing about memory that we don't like to talk about now, which is that our memories are getting flimsier, at least mine is. 

I think that's what makes the exercise so rich though, because it allows you to find points that maybe have faded way, just, you know, we're in our mid-70s, so believe me, there have been a lot of memories laid down since adolescence.

I don't know if this is advice, but it's more caution: If you create a memory project for yourself and start to do it, don't be surprised if you have like vivid or even unsettling dreams. Don't be surprised if some of the things you uncover are not pleasant.

Things that I remembered as painful have lost their charge just through the act of putting them in the perspective of time. You don't know what's going to happen, and you don't know what emotions are going to come up. And it would be good to be prepared, to stay nimble, and be prepared for anything to come out.

For those of us in the mid-70s, those are words to live by whether you're doing memoir or just trying to figure out what to make for dinner. Knees bent and tray tables up. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this conversation.

The conversation between Jonathan Lerner and Jane Trombley was recorded September 2024.  

From Crow's Feet: Life As We Age: If Memory Serves - A Memoirist on Writing About The  Past , Nov 13, 2024
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