A Domestic Geography of Everyday Terror: Remembering and Forgetting the House I Grew Up In

Abstract

When I close my eyes and try to remember my childhood, I get extremely anxious. For, to me, to engage in this process is literally to ‘re-member’, to give my past life arms and legs, to let it walk around, talk, live. I can’t do this. I can’t produce what Russell Meares and others have called an ‘autobiographical memory’ (2000, p. 37), which stores a sense of a life history from early childhood, starting from around the age of four. Instead, I can only provide a jumble of sensory impressions. None of them are dated; I can’t even place very specific memories of just one event. I simply don’t know quite when things happened. My usual response when asked to nominate an age when an event took place is to state, ‘about ten’. This answer only works for so long with partners, friends and therapists, before they get suspicious. The problem for me is that if I vary the response, I will almost certainly forget which age went with which memory and so become unstuck and, ultimately, unmasked as a fraud who can’t even remember her own life. It is unbelievably frustrating that almost no one realizes that, for me, the past is like a finely woven shawl which has large rents torn through it, so there are really more holes than cashmere, but just enough thread to hold it together if one doesn’t pull at the garment but treats it with infinite care.