Memoir - Bridget

 Mary Karr's excerpt connected a lot to the article we read last class on the art of the memoir. Both articles focused on the complexity of memory. It is true that we don't remember things perfectly accurately, often times getting facts wrong or even remembering things completely incorrectly. I think the fact that these authors find this fact so important when writing a memoir is interesting. I feel like because we all have this fault, it could almost be considered a margin of error in this genre. Most of these memoirists are not trying to deceive their reader, over-exaggerating or changing the story on purpose. Of course, I think that this would be wrong, the story would not be a memoir but could still be considered a great work of fiction. The fact that Karr tests her students by creating a scene and later asking them to tell her what happened is interesting to me as well. It is cool that she opens her students' eyes to their ability to create false memories, but I'm not sure what this information does with their ability to write a memoir. It's not like having this knowledge is going to make it easier for them to remember correctly. The only thing I can think of for how this exercise could help them in their writing is to humble them. It seems that Karr finds it important for her students to understand when they might be getting something wrong (which could be true at any time), and be honest with their readers. Either way, I'm not sure I completely agree with the importance of this. I think that Winterson's work did a great job of giving details in a more general sense so she could avoid giving false memories. While she did give exact descriptions of an event, like her conversation with her adopted mother from the phone booth, but I felt like a lot of the content she gave was based on her emotions. This seems like something that would stay concrete in a memory. She reflects on her she felt as an adopted child, not understanding what love was. The only time she expressed her confused mix of incorrect emotions was the memory of her adoptive mother hitting her at the end of the excerpt. She said that she remembers it as a happy memory though she knows it was not. This was an interesting moment of truth. It was really honest and I think some of us can relate to this confusion of emotions connected to our past, as emotions can also be remembered incorrectly.