I have been thinking about the moment a memoirist puts pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, and tries to capture something that happened. There is an assumption embedded in the act: that what happened is still there, somewhere, waiting to be retrieved. Like opening a filing cabinet and finding the document intact.

But what if the filing cabinet is not a cabinet? What if it is a workshop, and every time you open it, you are not retrieving a file but building something new?

This is what the research on autobiographical memory suggests, and it has changed how I think about what memoirists actually do.

The model comes from Martin Conway and Christopher Pleydell-Pearce, who in 2000 proposed what they called the Self-Memory System.¹Conway, M.A. and Pleydell-Pearce, C.W., 2000. The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10789197/ Their argument was striking: autobiographical memory is not a recording. It is a construction, built within a system that is shaped by the self that does the remembering.

The structure they describe has three levels. At the top are lifetime periods, which are themed chunks of self-knowledge: “when I was at university,” “the years I worked in retail,” “the time I lived in that flat with the broken heater.” These are not neutral time stamps. They are organised around the meaning they hold for the person remembering. Below lifetime periods are general events, which cluster around common themes: holidays, arguments, routines, the texture of a particular relationship. And at the bottom are event-specific details, the vivid sensory moments that make a memory feel alive.

Here is what strikes me: the research shows that event-specific knowledge is the first to fade. The vivid details go first. What survives are the themes, the general shapes, the meaning. By the time you sit down to write about something that happened ten years ago, the details you remember are not what happened. They are what your self, in this moment, decided was worth keeping.

Elizabeth Loftus has spent decades demonstrating just how malleable these constructions are. Her work shows that memories are reconstructed, not replayed, and that the process of reconstruction is vulnerable to suggestion, framing, and even outright fabrication.²Loftus, E., 2021. How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-loftus-changed-the-meaning-of-memory This is not a flaw in human memory. This is how it works.

So what does this mean for the memoirist?

On one level, it is unsettling. If the self that writes is not the self that lived the events, then what exactly is being captured on the page? The gap between the twenty-year-old who walked through a particular door and the fifty-year-old writing about it is not a small one. The meanings have changed. The self that remembers has different goals, different concerns, a different relationship to the past. And so the memory itself changes.

I wonder if this is why so many memoirists describe the writing process as discovery. You sit down to write about something you think you know, and what emerges is something you did not expect. The memory seems to have its own agenda. This makes sense if you understand memory as a construction rather than a retrieval. You are not opening a file. You are building something, and the building process reveals what you actually believe about yourself, what you actually feel, in this moment.

There is another layer to this. The working self, as Conway and Pleydell-Pearce describe it, does not simply retrieve memories. It edits them. It prioritises memories that support the current narrative of who you are. It downgrades or suppresses memories that do not fit. This is not deception. It is self-maintenance. But it means that what you remember is shaped by who you believe yourself to be, and who you believe yourself to be is shaped by what you remember.

The question then shifts. It is not “how do I remember accurately?” It becomes “how do I honour the construction while staying honest about its shape?”

There is a kind of truth that lives in the construction itself. The facts of what happened may be unstable, may shift with each retrieval, but the meaning, the emotional truth, the way a particular moment connects to who you are now – that is real. That is the thing worth capturing.

I think about the memoirists whose work feels most honest to me. They are not the ones who seem to have retrieved the most accurate record of events. They are the ones who seem aware of their own constructing hand. They write with a kind of humility about the gap between what happened and what they can say about what happened.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the “moment of being” – those rare flashes where the past and present collide and you see the shape of your own life from the outside. These moments are not retrievals. They are constructions, born from the collision of memory and imagination, of who you were and who you have become. The memoirist who captures these moments is not recording history. They are making meaning.

Maybe that is the most honest move a memoirist can make: to acknowledge that the story on the page is already a story you have told yourself. Not in a way that invalidates it, but in a way that deepens it. The construction is not a problem to solve. It is the very thing that makes memory meaningful.

What we remember is already a gift we have given ourselves, shaped by who we have become. The task is not to undo that shaping. The task is to write it with care.

• 1
  Conway, M.A. and Pleydell-Pearce, C.W., 2000. The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10789197/
• 2
  Loftus, E., 2021. How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-loftus-changed-the-meaning-of-memory