Memory and the fictional imagination: Creating memories

Abstract

At the end of Woody Allen’s film Another Woman (1988), the question is asked: ‘Is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost?’ This is a pleasing formulation because of the resonance with the idea that a memory may be treasured — a mental keepsake — but also a placemarker for something departed. A memory is perhaps what the mind has left of something the individual has lost; sometimes it is all we have left.