Amnesia in young adult fiction

Abstract

Adolescence is supposed to be a time to remember. Guidance given in a nineteenth-century moral manual, Advice to Teens, was to live life to the full for ‘the loss of time is irretrievable’,1 and throughout the twentieth century diaries were popular as aides-mémoires for this crucial period of development.2 Add current youth practices of ‘capturing the moment’ for posterity on Facebook or Instagram and it is easy to conclude that the teenage years really are the ‘best years of one’s life’ and not to be forgotten. Psychologists researching autobiographical memory across the life span offer support for the importance of creating memories in youth, identifying a ‘reminiscence bump’ indicating that a high proportion of memories recollected in older age are of events that happen between the ages of 15 and 25 (Rubin et al. 1986). Similarly, studying published autobiographies has demonstrated that the epiphanies or autobiographical ‘turns’ so fundamental to the structure of modern memoirs tend to be formed around events established in the memory in mid to late teenagehood (Sturrock 1993).