What is your favorite quote?
What is your favourite quote?
“I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.” Vladimir Nabokov
It matters to me above the many other quotations I might have chosen because I have lived by it in my writing. It describes not only why I write about memory, but what happens to memory when I write.
I have been blogging since 1999 and keeping diaries since my teens. The diaries caught things close to the moment: what happened, where I went, who I met, what I wanted, what delighted or infuriated me. Decades later, the facts remain useful, but the memories that matter have done something else. They have grown stronger and stranger.
According to my blog, I began quoting Nabokov in April 2011. I am certain, though, that the idea had become something of a mantra much earlier, certainly by 2002 in my original Diaryland blog. Somewhere along the way it stopped being merely a quotation I admired and became a definition of what I was trying to do.
First it belonged in the blog. Then it came to define my writing.
That distinction between stronger and stranger is important. Memory isn’t a recording. Return to an event often enough and other things attach themselves to it: later knowledge, regret, desire, humour, embarrassment, photographs, letters, other people’s recollections and the person you subsequently became. The sixteen-year-old who wrote the diary entry knew only what had happened that day. The older writer knows what came next.
That is where memory begins to shade into fiction.
I don’t mean inventing the past and passing it off as fact. I mean recognising that remembered experience has shape, atmosphere, characters, recurring motifs and unresolved stories. A few hurried sentences in a teenage diary can contain the seed of something far larger. Love the memory enough—return to it, interrogate it, turn it around and look at it from another angle—and it becomes material.
That has been the thread running from my teenage diaries, through blogging from 1999 onwards, to the memoir and fiction I write now. I keep returning to particular people, places, encounters and moments because they refuse to become smaller with age. Quite the opposite.
They become stranger.
And, wonderfully, stronger.
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