On answers and memory

I thought it might seem a little crazy, writing letters to my imaginary friends and all, but dammit if Jude didn't pipe up and scream an answer at me in the car the other morning. Carli's aloof but I wouldn't expect much else from her. So I'm writing up the ending of Jude's story now, and the story's not going to be a great one necessarily but I certainly like it. It's short and offbeat. Maybe quirky but I think maybe it says something worth saying. Paints a picture worth looking at. We'll see.

I got that idea from the book I'm reading now, Past Forgetting by Jill Robinson, which I'm about a third of the way through. It's not bad. She writes about the epilepsy attack that got her into an accident in a pool that caused some pretty nasty damage to her brain's memory banks. The book fills a lust for memoirs that made itself known to me a couple years back that I haven't sated in quite a while, though it's not terribly inspiring or gripping so far. The book focuses on the aftermath of the accident, her working her way through coping and such, and it's written from a first person present tense sort of perspective, and it's written in a way that I think is meant to capture the experience of going through the ordeal itself, all of which is simultaneously quite compelling and somewhat off-putting. It's compelling in the sense that there is a plot--you can see the narrator of the book get "better" and you wonder how far that recovery's going to go. It's a bit off-putting because it can feel (understandably) scatterbrained. It invites questions of narrative structure and composition while also inviting questions of authorial method and such, all of which is more than I care to dig into right now, I think.

What I like are some of the oddly beautiful moments, like the bit quoted in the entry down this page. Jill was a writer before the accident and as the book's been picking up steam (a thin mist of steam but steam) the plot's been driving towards her recovery as a writer as much as her recovery as a person, so you get oddball writerly moments like the one from the quote. Or moments such as:

So my memory may not be so much pulling up an image fixed by a program as rummaging through antique markets with Judith and recreating images, rooms, scenes from long-gone decades. This makes memory more like the act of an artist or storyteller, something to be drawn up. I don't have to remember things or situations so much as to be able to do the act, to find the creative trails.

Which is a fascinating idea. And way way inviting of more capital-q Questions about narrative/intention and such. But, I'm only a third of the way through the book and not ready for that yet, so.