Steve Paulson is on the radio, on “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” talking to Jill Price, a 42-year-old woman who can remember with perfect clarity every day of her life. Someone asks her what happened on May 1, 1990, say, and she rattles off the day’s events as if they took place last week. No one can figure out why she’s able to do this, and of course I’m skeptical, because for all we know she could be a brilliant con artist who’s very good at faking this uncanny talent. But the thing that’s most convincing to me is that she hates her capacity for total recall. She says that as she remembers all the things she’s done as if they happened yesterday, she regrets all the wrong, misguided she’s done as if they happened yesterday.
Memories are supposed to fade, and I suspect that forgetting is a function that ensures our mental health. If everything I did in college, in high school, and even before then, were as immediate to me now as the conversation I had last night about Milwaukee’s Best, I don’t think I could live with myself.
I’m interested in Jill Price’s memoir, maybe even enough to read it, because unless I’m mistaken one of the things that memoirs hinge on is the fickleness of memory; the uncertainty of an author’s capacity to remember is part of what makes the writing a challenge, and it helps to define the form. You know you’re reading a memoir when the author resorts, for the sake of remembering, for the sake of getting things right, to describing photographs relevant to the subject at hand, to admitting the haziness of a memory. You can have a memoir with that element missing, but still, I wonder how a flawless memory affects the attempt to work in this form.
From Wikipedia: “The claim of Price’s perfect memory has been contested as manifesting merely as an obsessive compulsion with herself and her own life and past, and she seems not to have any extraordinary ability to memorize things not related to them, and shows no signs of above-normal ability to memorize new data not related to her own life.” Sounds likely enough to me.
