The woman at the next table is eating a lamington. Not just eating it, really communing with it, dragging each square through weak black coffee, letting the sponge soften, then lifting it to her mouth with a reverence that suggests she has forgotten everything else in the world.

I watch her and I think about what is happening in that moment of immersion. The sponge, the cocoa, the coffee, the texture of damp sweetness against the tongue. It is such a small thing, a lamington, one of those unremarkable objects that populates the landscape of an ordinary afternoon. But I wonder if somewhere in the woman’s mind, this very lamington has opened a door she did not ask to be opened. There is something about the way she holds herself, the slight forward lean, the faraway look, that tells me she is not entirely here. She is somewhere else, inside a moment she did not choose to revisit.

The neuroscience of smell and memory tells us something remarkable. When an odor enters the nose, it does not travel the same route as sight or sound. It bypasses the thalamus, that central relay station of the brain, and goes directly to the amygdala and the hippocampus. One synapse. That is all it takes. The smell arrives before thought has a chance to intervene, before language can soften or edit what is being felt.¹Willander, J., & Larsson, M., 2014. Olfactory LOVER: behavioral and neural correlates of autobiographical odor memory. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00312/full This is why a smell can feel like a time machine. You are not remembering the past. You are inside it.

Researchers have found that olfactory imagery, the act of simply imagining a smell, can be more effective than visual imagery at retrieving certain kinds of autobiographical memories. Specifically, it unlocks unpleasant memories from adulthood and pleasant memories from childhood with equal ease.²Cicchella, A., Diolondiz, C., et al., 2022. Olfactory imagery as a retrieval method for autobiographical memories. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10017607/ This surprised me when I first read it, because we tend to think of smell memories as exclusively nostalgic, like something from a softened Monet. But the research shows that the door swings both ways. The same mechanism that brings back a grandmother’s kitchen can also surface a memory we would rather keep buried. Sensory triggers are morally neutral. They do not care whether the feeling they unlock is warm or sharp.

For the memoir writer, this is both exciting and terrifying.

There is a reason Proust’s madeleine has become the shorthand for involuntary memory. But what is often misunderstood about that famous scene is that it is not really about the cake at all. Scholars have noted that the memory is triggered not just by the taste but by the texture of the tea-soaked sponge, the warmth of the liquid, the particular way the crumbs feel against the palate. And crucially, the reason this works is that smell and taste do not have names the way objects do. We do not have vocabulary for the quality of an odor. We have words for the source of the smell, but not for the smell itself. This means smell gets lodged in memory without the interference of language. It has not been talked about, analysed, softened through retelling. It arrives raw.³Doyle, M., 2020. More than cake: unravelling the mysteries of Proust’s madeleine. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/07/more-than-cake-unravelling-the-mysteries-of-proust-s-madeleine

I find this thought quietly revolutionary. When we write memoir, we are constantly translating experience into language, and in that translation something is always lost. But when we write about a sensory memory, especially smell or taste, we are working with material that has not been through that process yet. It arrived pre-linguistic. And so the memoirist faces a specific challenge: how do you put into words something that exists in the mind before words?

The answer, I think, is not to try harder. It is to try less. The power of a sensory memory lies in its immediacy, in the way it lands in the body before the mind can frame it. When we over-explain a smell in memoir, when we analyse it or interpret it too quickly, we lose the very thing that makes it potent. The reader does not need to understand the smell. The reader needs to smell it.

This is why sensory detail is not decoration. It is not the literary equivalent of throwing confetti into a scene to make it festive. It is the door itself. When you write about the particular smell of rain on hot bitumen, or the way a particular soap smelled in a particular bathroom in 1987, you are not describing a memory. You are handing the reader the key to walk into it. The sensory details you choose to include, and which you choose to leave out, say as much about what matters as any plot point. This is a principle explored by many memoir teachers, and it is one of those craft ideas that seems simple until you try to apply it.

The woman at the next table has finished her lamington. She sits now with empty hands and a distant expression, and I do not know what she is feeling. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the lamington was just a lamington. But perhaps, for a moment she was somewhere else entirely, in a time she had not thought about in decades, inside a memory so vivid it felt like the present. That is what we are trying to do when we write memoir. Not to record the past, but to open the door to it. And the surest key we have is the senses.

• 1
  Willander, J., & Larsson, M., 2014. Olfactory LOVER: behavioral and neural correlates of autobiographical odor memory. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00312/full
• 2
  Cicchella, A., Diolondiz, C., et al., 2022. Olfactory imagery as a retrieval method for autobiographical memories. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10017607/
• 3
  Doyle, M., 2020. More than cake: unravelling the mysteries of Proust’s madeleine. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/07/more-than-cake-unravelling-the-mysteries-of-proust-s-madeleine