What to read to understand memory

Three books that explore our not always reliable relationship with the past

The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1790)

An extraordinary performance, as Rousseau leads us “into every least corner of my life” and recalls his deeds and misdeeds over half a century. He steals, he lies, he sends all five of his children to an orphanage, and that’s not even to mention his sexual transgressions. His memory isn’t reliable: he’s more trustworthy about feelings than about facts and dates. But he offers a ground rule for all memoir writers: “I have never put down as true what I knew to be false.”

Remind Me Who I Am, Again by Linda Grant (1998)

“Memory, I have come to understand, is everything, it’s life itself,” Linda Grant writes in a memoir prompted by her mother being diagnosed with multi-infarct dementia. “She’s here, with me, but her memory is on a boat that has had its moorings cut and is gone beyond the horizon.” This loss of memory stifles Grant’s search to know more about her family’s past in Poland and Russia: “I don’t know if it’s a tragedy or blessing when Jews, who insist on forgiving and forgetting nothing, should end their lives remembering nothing.” All she has are bits and pieces, but she creates a powerful book from them.

Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski (1997)

“Memory is not false in the sense that it is wilfully bad,” Diski says, “but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past.” Her impulse to go to Antarctica doesn’t come from a desire to travel but from an addiction to the “boundless expanses of white” she remembers from her time in a psychiatric hospital. The real journey in the book is back to childhood, to her parents’ troubled relationship and her own fractured identity. “Memory is continually created, a story told and retold.” What she creates is a nonfiction masterpiece.

On Memoir: An A-Z of Life Writing by Blake Morrison is published by the Borough Press on 9 April (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Michael Van Woert/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association