The Woman Who Can't Forget

by Jill Price

  Schacter argues that the “seven sins” have evolved over time because they are advantageous in many ways, or are the by-products of memory functions that have served us well. Through the long sweep of human history, they have been, in the words of evolutionary theory, adaptive. Egocentric bias, for example, can significantly improve well-being by making the past look a whole lot more successful or happy than it really was. I can’t honestly say that I’d really want to have these “abilities,” because I do like that my memory is so complete, though some egocentric bias would probably have done me a world of good. I also find myself wondering about the trade-offs in terms of knowing the truth about our lives. To me, accuracy about what has happened to me, about who said what when, and about the truth of a situation is vital. Interestingly, research in positive psychology shows that those who are natural optimists tend to remember their failures less accurately, seeing them in a relatively positive light. Research also shows, though, that their optimism, which has so many benefits, comes with a trade-off about realism, which in some circumstances, such as when it’s important to be able to size up accurately a challenge being faced, can be problematic.

  One of the most interesting questions about memory and forgetting is how much of each is optimal in our lives. The strength of the natural process of forgetting is remarkable to me. One study showed that over a period of 300 days, approximately 3 percent of life events were “highly memorable,” which works out to about one event every three weeks. That sort of gap in the record of my life would truly disturb me. But then consider the case, fictional though it is, of the subject in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story “Funes, the Memorious,” which many people have said I would enjoy.

  In the story, a teenage Argentinian boy named Ireneo Funes takes a bad fall while horseback riding and begins to have perfect memory. He remembers absolutely everything he sees and hears and reads in the finest detail. He remembers in such fine detail, in fact, that he has trouble sleeping at night, which has often been true for me, because he is rehearsing those limitless details in his mind. He can learn whole volumes of arcane information in mere days and develops an extraordinary facility for picking up foreign languages. He reads about historical cases of superior memory and marvels about what was so special in those cases because his memory is so much stronger than those people’s were. So acute and complete did his memory become that, Borges writes, “he remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882,” and he “not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.” Tragically, Funes ultimately becomes lost in all of that detail, or, more accurately, imprisoned by it. He cannot free his mind from the minutiae he has become fixated by, and the narrator of the story conjectures that he has even lost the ability to truly think, because thinking requires being able to get perspective and to generalize, which Funes could no longer do. It is a strange and harrowing vision, and not insignificantly, Borges adds into the plot of the story that at the same time Funes was invested with his perfect memory in the fall from the horse, he became crippled.

  I’m thankful that, complete as it is, my memory is not at all as fixated on details as was that of Funes, but the story is certainly thought provoking in terms of the ways in which my memory has ruled my life. In telling the story of my life in the rest of this book, it is in very large part the story of my memory that I will be relating, and I hope that in doing so, I shed some interesting light on that intricate, tricky dance of remembering and forgetting in all of our lives.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I Was a Child

  We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

  —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

  It is one of the great ironies of human experience that by the time we are old enough to reflect on what it is like to be a child, we are usually far removed from the experience.

  —Stuart C. Aiken, Playing with Children

  After the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered…the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls…bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.

  —Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

  One of the longest-standing notions in psychology is that even though we forget almost all of our earliest experiences, they shape us in profound ways, and one of the original goals of psychotherapy was to unearth those shaping experiences so that they could be intellectually and emotionally conquered. Although much of what Freud conjectured has been rejected by most psychologists, his central insight about early experiences playing a large role in personality development, and in continuing to influence us later in life, rings true to me, given my own life experience. Not only did the memories of my earliest years influence my life profoundly as I grew up, but they continue to do so. Given how vividly I recall a number of memories from between two and three years old, I certainly appreciate what the value of repressing might be.

  I can still feel the irrational fears and unduly intense emotions about what—to adults—are in no way traumatic events, but kids are often horribly upset by. Remembering as many of my earliest memories as I do and as vividly as I do, I think that a great deal of the experience that becomes subconscious for most people has remained conscious for me. I’ve lived with a good deal of the roiling, irrational influence of what is normally driven into the subconscious right on the surface of my mind for my whole life.

  What is your earliest memory? Perhaps you’ve known what that memory is for some time and can answer this question right away. It’s true that at a certain point in our lives, our recall of our first memories becomes relatively fixed, though interesting research has shown that as late as in their twenties, most people’s answers about what their first memories are still vary quite a bit from one time they’re asked to the next. So, ask yourself again what that earliest memory is.

  Stretch your mind back as far as you can go, and consider what your memory for the earliest years of your life is like. Maybe it’s of a younger sibling showing up as a baby in the house or a bad fall. Those are common ones. Maybe it’s something that scared you, like a dog barking at you, or something that confused you, like not being able to open a door in your house. Is it hazy? Is it a full event or just a fleeting moment? Maybe it’s only a static vision of something, like a room in your home or a toy you loved. Can you hear anything that was being said to you or to someone else in the memory? Do you have any sense of smell associated with it? And do you feel any emotion when you recall it?

  One of the most widely accepted findings in the science of memory is that about what’s called childhood amnesia: the almost complete loss of autobiographical memory for the first two to three years of life. Yet scientists still don’t know for sure why we forget these years.

  Arguments about when the first long-term memories are formed in the brain differ. Some research has indicated that the brain may become capable of storing them as early as eighteen months. One study seemed to show that we may have some memory capacity even before we are born. In that study, mothers read aloud the same story passage repeatedly in the last months of their pregnancy, and when that passage was read to their babies in the first thirty-three hours after birth, they showed signs of recognizing it. But there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that memories we may form from as early as that are ultimately lost. An interesting finding that seems to back up the assertion that it is at about eighteen months that infants begin to be able to remember is that this is also when they first demonstrate an awareness of a self. They recognize that they are looking at themselves in a mirror. But it doesn’t seem to be until about twenty-two months that they develop a sense of self-consciousness, as we tend to think of our sense of self—to know that they are an individual in the world.

  The range of age when the brain seems to develop in the ways that allow us to retain m
emories in the long term is generally between three and seven years, and a widely accepted argument is that long-term memory really begins at age four. Some people may have a few memories from before three years of age and some may not have any until even older than seven, but for many people, their first few memories are from between ages two and three.

  The study of childhood amnesia is one of the truly fascinating areas of research in the science of memory, and I find the different theories about what causes it deeply thought provoking. Freud argued that it was due to the need to forget—or, to be more precise, to repress—traumatic early experiences. Some researchers have argued that it’s due to the timing of the physical development of the brain, and that before certain structures are in place, memories can’t be stored, at least not for the long term. But other work has suggested that the forgetting process is actually more significant—that it’s not so much that we can’t form memories at that age, but that our forgetting is in overdrive for this period. Still another theory is that we don’t remember those years because we don’t yet have language ability, and without language, autobiographical memories can’t be encoded in our minds.

  A theory that is especially intriguing to me, given the nature of my own earliest memories, argues that the reason we forget the first years is that the mind of an infant is different from that of an older child and an adult. An infant’s understanding of the world is so undeveloped that the mind is not yet able to make sense of events in ways that allow episodic memories to be filed away. I can attest from my own recall that the infant mind is a wildly irrational one.

  I do have childhood amnesia, but I also have a good number more memories from those earliest years than is normal. Some of them are intensely dear to me, and others can still send a shock of child fear and anger coursing through me.

  My abiding overarching feeling for those early days is that I felt utterly loved in the warm cocoon of a close and caring family. There’s no question that my memory of that time has played a powerful role in my life, both as a refuge that I retreat to and, I’m afraid, as an anchor that has in some ways weighed me down, keeping me tied firmly to a phase of life that most of us remember only quite vaguely and move on from without incessantly looking back.

  I was born in 1965 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City to a close, loving, and protective Jewish family. Actually, “protective” doesn’t even begin to describe it. When I was four years old, I had my tonsils out at Roosevelt Hospital, and my maternal grandmother insisted we take a taxi home, which seemed odd to me since we lived in the apartment building across the street. I remember wondering while I was being put into the cab why we weren’t just walking. Family was a big part of my childhood in New York, and our apartment was always filled with relatives on both my mother’s and father’s side. For my first few years, I didn’t actually realize they were from two different families.

  We lived at the Coliseum Apartments—a complex of two apartment buildings on Fifty-eighth to Sixtieth Streets at Ninth Avenue, with a private garden in between the buildings. The garden was a magical place to me. It had thick green grass and was lined with walkways and benches and planted with rosebushes and big potted trees. All the preschool children played there during the day while the mothers talked and rocked their babies in their carriages. Our apartment had a wonderful view of St. Paul’s Church across the street, and I loved the way its stone walls glistened in the sunshine. One of my favorite things to do was to climb up on the couch in our living room and look out the window at the view down Ninth Avenue to the Lincoln Tunnel; I was fascinated by how the roads and bridges crisscrossed. That view still means so much to me that eighteen years after we had moved away from New York, when I was in the city for Thanksgiving 1989, I took a friend to see our building and ended up standing in the middle of the street taking photo after photo down Ninth Avenue. To this day I still go to see the building we lived in every time I am in New York.

  One reason that those earliest days have remained special to me is that they were also special to my parents. My mother says those days of the 1960s in the city were the best decade of her life because that’s when she met my dad and had her family. They were deeply in love and were finding a new place for themselves in the world as my father’s career as an entertainment agent started to take off. I loved hearing my dad talk about his work, and in the evenings, I couldn’t wait for him to come home. Every night, I’d sit with him and my mother as he ate dinner and told her about his day.

  Psychologists say that the stories our parents tell us about their own lives may have a significant shaping influence on us as we struggle to make sense of who we are, developing a concept of our own personalities. Our parents may also play an important role in what we end up remembering about our lives—what gets stored away in our long-term memories or what we tend to recall about our own lives. I know that for me, the stories that I heard about my parents’ lives have meant a great deal to my sense of self, and I loved being taken into the story of their lives.

  My father’s family came from Newark, New Jersey, and he grew up there in the 1940s and 1950s, when lots of people who would go on to national acclaim, like author Philip Roth, were growing up close by, though he didn’t know them. My grandfather owned a gas station in the Italian section of the city, which was strictly divided into enclaves by ethnic groups: Jews in one area, Italians in another, Poles in another. My father made quite a transformation in his life by getting into the entertainment business. He never made a conscious decision to go into the business; the notion was planted in his head by a friend one day, and my dad laughs when he remembers responding that maybe he could be an agent, because he didn’t even know what an agent did. All he knew about agenting was what he had seen in the movies: the agent was the guy with the tattersall hat who went into a phone booth and made deals and got 10 percent.

  At the time there were three big agencies—MCA, William Morris, and GAC. My dad managed to get interviews at all three and started off in the mailroom of William Morris, as all those aspiring to become agents for William Morris did. Within three months, he caught a lucky break that set his career into fast-forward. He was told to fill in for the sick secretary to one of the agents, Bernie Brillstein, who for decades was one of the biggest managers in the entire business and still commands a great deal of respect. Brillstein discovered Jim Henson and his Muppets, and later he handled Lorne Michaels and the Saturday Night Live comedians and writers. My dad had expected that he’d just be working for Bernie for a week or so until his secretary was better, but it turned out that the secretary didn’t come back to work for four months, and those four months were an amazing time for my dad. Every Friday night, Bernie hosted a crap game at his apartment, around the corner from William Morris, and powerful people in the entertainment business would come by. My father started developing connections, and before long, Bernie had put him and two other agents in charge of a new commercials department at the agency. Though working with commercials wasn’t as sexy as movies or TV, they managed a lot of young talent, like the Second City Players and actors like George Segal, who was just starting out.

  I loved hearing about my father’s clients as a young child, and spending time with him at work, and those early days with him are among my most cherished memories. At that age, when I was two through five, I didn’t recognize any of the people he was talking about, including Ray Charles, one of my dad’s clients who came to dinner once at our apartment. To me, Ray was just a very tall man with a wonderful smile standing in my living room, and—testimony to the fact that children’s minds are not yet capable of making coherent sense of the world—I even suspected that he might possibly be my grandfather on my father’s side. My grandfather had died before I was born, and all I really knew about him was that his name was Charles, so I asked Ray, “Are you my grandpa?”

  The most fun for me about my dad’s work was getting to go with him to the Ed Sullivan show. In those days, a younger agent was always assigned to
escort the William Morris clients who were appearing on the show. This was a once-a-month duty, and the agent would stay with them while they rehearsed all day Saturday and Sunday until the show went live, at 8:00 P.M. on Sunday night. Often my dad would take me with him. First we would have breakfast at the Carnegie Delicatessen with a wonderful comedian known in the business as Fat Jack Leonard, who would always say to me, “Come here, little girl, you married? You’re not married, little girl?” One of my favorite times watching the rehearsal at the Ed Sullivan show was when I was mesmerized by a magician practicing his magic act, but I was really more enamored by the assistant in her beautiful sequined dress than by his magic tricks. I thought the dress was so gorgeous that I told my dad, “Mommy should have a dress just like that.” Every time Ed saw me sitting with my dad, he would come over and make a fuss over me. His son-in-law, the executive producer of the show, was really nice to me too, and he would bring a stool over to the side of the stage for me to sit on. Often I’d be sitting right next to Ed as the acts rehearsed.

  My father’s job as an agent not only made for an interesting childhood for me; it actually led to my birth. My mother and father met one day when my dad was working for an agent who represented the band leader Mitch Miller. He took some papers out to where Miller’s show was shot in Brooklyn, at the Avenue M Studio, where silent movies had been made in the early days of film. The

  Perry Como Show was shot there too. The studio had two big stages, and Perry used one and Mitch the other. My dad went there to deliver some papers to a client, which he had volunteered to do because there were always pretty girls out there—all the shows’ dancers.