Portland writer Sallie Tisdale on the inconsistency of memory

For many people, memories are foundational. Even though they exist in the past, they inform who we are in the present and can help us make future decisions. So what happens when something that seems so fundamental turns out to be false?

Portland writer Sallie Tisdale deals with some of those themes in an essay she wrote for Oregon Humanities magazine this summer. She joins us to talk about her latest work, the inconsistencies of memory and what it means to write a good memoir.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with memory, with its slipperiness and permeability and untrustworthiness. The Portland writer Sallie Tisdale has been exploring both the limitations and the power of memories for years now. It’s the focus of her recent essay for the Oregon Humanities magazine. And Sallie Tisdale joins us now to talk about it. Welcome back.

Sallie Tisdale: Thanks for having me.

Miller: The prompt for submissions for this latest issue of the Oregon Humanities magazine was memory. Why did you choose to write about the county fair when you were growing up?

Tisdale: Well, it came at the right time because I’ve been writing a lot about memory and how we work with our own pasts. I’m very curious about how, as time goes by, our pasts change in our minds.

The county fair was the pinnacle of summer for us. I grew up in Yreka, California in Siskiyou County, which is a very large farming and ranching community with a few small towns. And so the county fair was really central to our summers. And as you know, you have vivid memories of certain times, and then these sort of fragmented memories of other times, right? And the county fair memories are quite bright for me.

So I wanted to interrogate it. The project I’m working on now is really interrogating my own past as to what is true? What really happened?

Miller: I wonder if you could read us two paragraphs from early on in this essay, which really illustrate the brightness and the vividness of what you’re talking about.

Tisdale: Oh, the fair!

“At the fair, children ran feral. I wandered the long, cool exhibit halls filled with pickles, quilts and giant squash. We went to the rodeo and the demolition derby, a concert of joyous noise and violence. In the commercial building, I collected buttons advertising vinyl siding, Bible stories, tractors. In the fragrant livestock pens, I leaned on the metal gates to gaze at pigs, chickens and lambs destined for auction and slaughter. Sharp sun soaked the acres of unkempt grass, and my brother and I would curl up in a spot of weak shade for lunch. Hot dogs, baked potatoes wrapped in foil, cotton candy spun out of thin air, and ice cream dribbling down onto our bare legs.

But first, last, we came for the midway. The screams and shouts, the doppler roar of the rollercoaster, the throng of humid teenagers necking in corners, conic speakers perched like shofar at the intersecting paths, blaring static-ridden pop songs. We came for the Hammer, the Scrambler, and the Zipper. For the faint nausea of centrifugal force. We came to toss ping pong balls into fish bowls and throw darts at balloons, dreaming of a giant stuffed panda bear.

August’s twilight was a gentle dimming of the day’s glare that seemed to last for hours until the shadows rose and turned the sky black. Then the lights snapped on, flashing gold and scarlet, green and orange, and my chest swelled with something tender and unnameable. I didn’t know the words for a long time. But I came for the melancholy. I came for the longing.”

Miller: You ended up focusing in this essay on one particular fragmentary set of memories from when you were in your early teens, and no longer just going there to visit, but you started working there. Can you tell us what you remember, or what you think you remember?

Tisdale: Oh yes. And I was just with my siblings, my brother and sister, and mentioned this to my sister. And she just looked at me and she said “you got into so much trouble for that.” And I don’t remember getting in trouble at all!

This is how it works. So what I was particularly remembering in this essay is being a very unhappy 14 year old, too smart for the little school and completely oppositional to my parents, and longing to get out of this little town and dreaming of big cities and universities. And I met a boy, he was probably 18 or 19. And we had a little week-long romance, and he asked me to go with him to join the carnival. There’s a word for it, I think it’s called May First-ers, people who just joined for the season.

But the memory I feel is that emotional memory of being on the cusp of something really crucial to the rest of my life, being at this moment of choice. And as time goes on, that moment really lives brightly in my memory.

But that’s one of the things I wanted to talk about Dave, because the neuroscience of memory, which is what I’ve been studying for some time now, shows us that the longer you remember something, the more often you remember it, the more you repeat it, the more it becomes narrative, it becomes a story with a coherent beginning, middle, and end, and the more you become a witness to it, rather than a participant. You become an observer.

So when I remember this, I actually see myself doing these things. I don’t see it from inside, do you know what I mean?

Miller: You’re watching a movie where you are a character, as opposed to being the video camera seeing out.

Tisdale: Absolutely. And this is very clearly the way our memories change, and there’s some very good neurological reasons for that, as well as psychological reasons.

So when we go back to investigate “did that really happen”, “was that really true”, “how did I come to believe that”, we’re investigating all the rivers of influence that come together.

Miller: This young man, 18 or 19, says to you “Hey, come with me.” What do you remember doing? And thinking?

Tisdale: I don’t know if I’m right. That’s why it’s so fun.

I remember sort of a sinking into something new, a sinking into a greater view. That’s what made it such an important cusp. Unhappy and cynical 14 year olds don’t see beyond themselves very much. The context is that we were given a free ride on the ferris wheel by ourselves after the carnival closed. So going round and round by ourselves in the dark, I could see my town, I could see the roads leading out of town, I could see the cars leaving the fair. I could see escape, I could see a way out of my life. And it allowed me to sink into a place where I could choose, instead of being driven. And that’s one of the key parts of becoming an adult is making a choice rather than being driven.

So that’s the emotional context that I remember, was maybe for the first time in my life, having the spaciousness to make a free choice.

Miller: It’s so fascinating that it was, to the extent that this actually happened, and we can talk about the extent to which it matters if it happened or not, but part of this memory is a literal physical vista. You could see the confines of your whole smallish world at that point, because you were up above. I don’t imagine that there were too many huge buildings around you.

Tisdale: No, I was just there. It’s still a very small town in a very large open range. It’s the biggest town in the county. We went on a long drive around the county, and when you come back in, it’s like the city, but it’s still a small town. And I could see, in a sense, farther than I’d ever seen before.

Miller: At what kinds of times would this story about yourself come to you? When would you think about this over the years?

Tisdale: Well I didn’t leave for two more years. I had two more years of being unhappy, dissatisfied, oppositional, struggling. But when I left, I left in a thoughtful way, for the most part.

This memory comes back to me every August, Dave, because the fair comes back to me every August. And it comes back whenever I see a picture of myself at that time. This is how memory works. One fragment leads to another fragment.

Miller: Have you been to fairs, either there, the Siskiyou County Fair, or other ones since then?

Tisdale: Oh, Dave. So, I was going down this summer. I haven’t been back for some years, obviously because of various concerns. And I had a date with my sister to go to the Siskiyou County Fair this summer, for the first time in many years actually.

And the McKinney fire happened. 66,000-some acres burned within a few miles of my hometown. The fair was canceled. The fairgrounds became a proving ground for the firefighters. There were more than 3,000 firefighters in town. So there was no fair. My grand niece and nephew had pigs to sell at the auction, and they couldn’t go. It was ironic that this was the year that that happened.

So I talked a friend into going to the state fair. And on Labor Day, we went and we saw this enormous line for tickets. We just wanted to ride the ferris wheel. So we went over and bribed the ferris wheel operator with $10 to give us a ride.

Miller: You’re still a scofflaw.

Tisdale: Still a scofflaw! Well, I get to play the older woman card now.

Miller: So you went there and took the big tours on the ferris wheel. One of the things that you were getting to, in terms of the brain science is, at least my understanding of this, is that each time we remember a memory, it’s not like we’re putting a perfect video recording on in our brain and then just watching it again. We’re changing it and then, and then the watching or remembering of the memory creates a new one, overwrites it in some way. And I’m wondering if literally going on a ferris wheel in your 60′s or 50s or whatever, if that does the same thing? If you try to recreate something, but you end up changing the past?

Tisdale: Yeah, you can’t help but do it. People think a memory is like a video recording or a photograph and it’s not like that at all. When you encode a memory, these miniscule neurochemical traces are scattered throughout the brain. And remember, the brain is picking and choosing all the time. And it usually discards novel details. We think we remember novel details, but we don’t, we mostly don’t even notice things that don’t fit our pattern.

And then you have to consolidate it, which takes minutes, maybe days in some cases. And there the memory is sitting. It’s just potential, in a way. Then, the actual remembering of it is called retrieval, which I love. You have to go find it and take it out of storage. That’s the key moment. I’m a long way from 14. Everything that has happened to me since that moment affects my memory of that moment. New inferences, new learning, new facts, new ideas, new experiences all combine to slightly change the fragments that I pull out and turn into a memory.

And we have a tendency to not just turn it into story, but to turn it into story that proves something we already believe. We use our memories. As one memory scientist told me this summer, you really should think of memory as a belief system. We tend to use our memories to prove what we think is true.

Miller: So not that then that the memories shape who we are, but who we are shapes our memories?

Tisdale: Exactly. So as a writer who uses my own past, and also I read and critique memoir by other writers, I have come to be very skeptical and suspicious of a lot of memory work. But that doesn’t mean I reject it, it makes it more interesting to me. One thing I was doing on this trip, I finally got to go down to my hometown, was to literally investigate certain memories and see if they still made sense.

Miller: What’s one of them that you tried to do that for? How do you investigate a memory?

Tisdale: I talked with a couple of people I knew from my childhood and some cousins. And I have a very powerful memory that we could walk up North Street or Lane Street, and it would just peter out into dirt and we’d be in the hills. And that’s where we caught snakes and lizards and just sort of ran like feral children as we were. But I go there now, and it seems like that’s a long way. How did we walk so far?

So I went to the museum, and I got them to find me a map of the town when I was 11 so I could see where the roads stopped then as opposed to where they stopped now and see if it made sense. You investigate it the same way you do any other investigative reporting, it’s just that your own past is the subject.

Miller: I assume everyone listening could think of some example of where we had a memory that we thought we could trust. You’re talking about looking in a geographical way, and it not making sense. But often you might talk to old friends or family members, and you realize that if a lot of other people you’re talking to are right, then you’re wrong. And that that can be, just speaking personally, a really discombobulating feeling. It’s like you can’t trust yourself. And there’s a fear that if you can’t trust yourself, who or what can you trust?

But when I hear you, it seems like you’re sort of celebrating this mystery. What do you appreciate about this? Because it can actually be sort of scary.

Tisdale: No, I don’t think so at all. Because I’m not a fixed object. You’re not a fixed object. And so it’s all right that our memories are not fixed objects. That lack of fixedness tells us something about the way we are always changing. We live in a river of change. And I do celebrate that. I don’t want to be fixed. I don’t want to be the same from day to day.

But what you just said, other people tell you your memory is wrong because it’s not their memory? Well, you can’t trust there’s either. So your brother or your sister have a slightly different memory than you because all those rivers of inference and learning are different for them than they were for you. It will always be thus.

Miller: Does it matter to you if the memory of that ferris wheel story is true, if in the end, it tells you something important about your longing for freedom and your longing for escape?

Tisdale: No, it doesn’t matter to me at all. If it was proven tomorrow that that never happened, I think I would just say “well, that’s interesting. That never happened.” But I still have the memory of believing that I made a free choice. I still have the memory of seeing my life in a more spacious way. Whether it was that way or another way doesn’t matter.

Now, we don’t have time to get into what matters when you write memoir. That’s a little different. I am critical of memoir writers who do not say this, who do not admit that their memories are selective, faulty, imperfect, limited. I think that that’s the interesting part.

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