Leslie Jamison uses Susannah Cahalan's new memoir, Brain on Fire, along with David Carr's The Night of the Gun, to ponder the ways our memory can deceive us:
When memory is lost, in some direct or conspicuous manner, we have to acknowledge what we should always acknowledge: that memory is constantly betraying us, constantly layering another self onto the self we actually inhabited. Which is to say, addiction and illness distill something that is already true about memory; we just have an easier time accepting this truth when it comes tagged as a pathology. Carr even points to a formula—the Ebbinghaus “forgetting curve”—that illustrates diminished retention of memory over time.
Cahalan's book focuses on an illness that made it difficult for her to form memories:
Cahalan eventually turns to what cannot flee from her grip: evidence. She quotes from a computer diary she kept during the initial stages of her illness: “Okay there’s no place to start but you have to, ok? And don’t be all ‘wow I didn’t spell check this’…who gives a shit what anyone things about me. I’m going to”—nothing after that. Going to what? The self who knows what isn’t around anymore. Cahalan writes: “Reading these entries now is like peering into a stranger’s stream of consciousness.” But it is not a stranger’s consciousness. It’s weirder than that. It is a homeless consciousness. If it doesn’t belong to Cahalan, it belongs to no one, which makes the memoir necessary: it offers a home to moments of consciousness that would otherwise be stranded in a kind of purgatory—not part of any life, but still part of what happened.
The Dish 