The Woman Who Can't Forget (12 page)

counseling center and Dean introduced me to Harry…
. And off my memory went. Then on April 5, I couldn't stop thinking about how, that same day the year before, we had gone shopping together at the Galleria to find a birthday gift for Dean. My memory was stretching the pain of the breakup out beyond all reason; it would do that to me with many of the incidents of my life as I grew older.

Another thing that was intriguing to me about Benedict Carey's article on writing life narratives was that the process can be therapeutic. It apparently can be a way of giving shape to and clarifying learning that's happened in the course of one's life, most often focusing on dramas of achievement, overcoming adversity, learning a major life lesson—stringing together a set of turning points or transformative changes, such as finding your life partner and how that changed you. That's apparently why one's narrative would likely evolve significantly if it was written at several different ages, accounting for changing life circumstances and new achievements, tragedies, and challenges.

Many years ago, psychologists articulated broad-brush descriptions of the shape of the general human life story, most famously Erik Erikson, arguing that each person's life is broken down into a key set of phases, though there is some variation in exactly how many phases are identified and how they are named. One such schema of life's “chapters” is infancy, early childhood, play age, school age, adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, and old age.

These more detailed life narratives that psychologists are now studying are a much more refined, individualized way of understanding the course of our personal development. A leading researcher in this field, Dan McAdams, has shown that a country's culture probably influences the overall type of narrative that people in that country tend to tell, and for Americans, the life narrative is often one of redemption—in other words, of having overcome challenges.

What's so intriguing to me about my experience versus what McAdams describes is that the impetus for me in getting my version of my life story down on paper was different. I found myself naturally drawn to the project of getting a delineation of the main epochs of my life down into an outline, which I refer to as my time line, in order to get the story fixed once and for all. I became almost compulsively fixated on doing so during a particularly stressful period of my post–high school life, and I think that the time line gave me some comfort and helped me feel I had made some sense of my life. I have never shared the time line with anyone before, including the UCI scientists.

It took me quite a bit of doing to get it down right. The notion that I ought to get the whole stretch of my life down this way formulated gradually, and I had been making notes on stickies and scraps of paper for some time and filing them away in a notebook. Then one day I suddenly felt the need to concentrate totally on getting the time line fully worked out, and on Sunday, June 17,1990, Father's Day, I went to my room and worked on it for almost a full day. I'd get partway through and decide it was off in some way and tear those pages out and begin again. Finally, while watching my new favorite show,
In Living

Color
, I had the whole thing down, and I felt an enormous sense of relief and accomplishment.

The list spans my entire life segmented into eras, bookended by significant events. The italicized dates are days that I consider to be life changing—good, bad; it could be either. They are personal anniversaries, and every year I mark these dates when they occur.

You might get a better idea of the way my mind holds on to and sorts through my memories if you tried to break up your life in this way too. Take every significant period of time and date it; break it down into smaller periods of importance bounded by dates; and finally take the specific dates of life-changing events such as births and deaths and great successes and failures and write those in. I bet doing so will be a fascinating experience.

Here is what my time line ended up looking like, though this is an updated version, which I've added to in the years since. The original went only through 1990:

This is my version of the story of my life, I suppose. In crafting it, I did identify what I considered to be pivotal events and stages of experience. For example, one entry,

September 1980 through March 1981
, was the first six months of high school, when I had just escaped from Westlake, the school I hated, and I was loving every minute of those months. Another,
April 1983 through June

1983
, covers the three months leading up to high school graduation, a period during which I was thinking a good deal about how much I had grown up.

Working out the phases of my life with such precision was comforting to me, perhaps in a way that is similar to the normal, more selective process of shaping one's life story. But none of these “archaeological” exercises of getting my life down on paper helped me to privilege any of my memories over others, or to distort them in any way, and though some stretches of the time line delineate periods of happiness and of growth, others bracket periods of turmoil and depression.

Rather than using my memories to craft and then recraft the story of my life into a narrative, or as Dan McAdams puts it, into a personal myth, my mind has been intent on fixing all of them, exactly as they happened, in stone. As one article describing the work in narrative psychology explained the mythologizing process: “New work by psychological researchers shows that in telling their life stories, people invent a personal myth, a tale that, like the myths of old, explains the meaning and goals of their lives.” By contrast, I would say, my mind has simply told and retold itself the story of the days of my life, day after day, just as they happened. That's not to say that I haven't derived meaning and lessons out of my experiences; I have. I knew that I had grown a great deal through the course of high school, and in those last few months I reflected on that personal growth a great deal. But I also remembered myself as the kid who hadn't grown up yet a great deal, and I think that undercut any ability to make any kind of myth for myself.

McAdams explains that “a life story is a personal myth” that helps to guide people toward the future with a sense of purpose. The fact that I didn't really seem to craft that myth is the reason I struggled so much with heading into the future after high school. I wasn't looking forward to college at the end of high school at all. Just the opposite. The more pressure I felt to move on and start a new life, the more emphatically I clung to my past because, I think, the future for me was all about a continuation of the past.

A
lthough selecting out positive memories wasn't something my mind helped me do, another of the processes that research shows helps us to come to terms with our memories does seem to work well for me: the process of talking about them, or more precisely of sharing them with others.

During my twenties, as the grip of my memory became a stranglehold on my life, day-to-day living became a harder and harder struggle. These are extremely difficult years for me to travel back to. One of the reasons that this was true is probably that I had mostly stopped talking about how oppressive my memories had become. It was so hard to describe what was going on in my head and so frustrating—often enraging—when my parents and friends didn't understand, that I pretty much gave up. Everyone in my life knew by this point that I had a remarkably strong memory. I'd share particular memories with them all the time, and fill in dates and remind them of times they'd forgotten as a matter of course. But what I didn't share very much after a point was how horrible it was to live with my memory. If I did try to explain how my memories were driving me crazy, people would usually respond, “Oh, but it's such a gift you have.” I couldn't manage to describe what was going on in my head well enough, and they weren't experts on memory and how it affects our lives. How could they have understood?

According to research showing the value of sharing the significant events of our lives with others through storytelling, I think this inability to explain how my memory was affecting me was itself an exacerbating factor in my memories dragging me down. The way that my memories had started rampaging out of control was the most significant happening in my life, and yet I could never truly find a way to describe it effectively, so I could never craft a meaningful story about it for my family and friends. Instead, I went increasingly interior with the torment of it, and I felt horribly alone in my mind.

One area of research about how the storytelling we do about our memories shapes our lives that is especially thought provoking for me has to do with the ways in which memories are shared within families. As one article explained, “This work has revealed different roles in group remembering, such as the narrator (who speaks the most and contributes the most detail to the group recollection), the mentor (who facilitates remembering), and the monitor (who interjects to prevent perceived inaccuracies and to ensure that important details are not left out). Mentors and monitors might be conceived of as listeners who exert clear influence over the group's final recollection.” It's fascinating to think about this description of the process versus the way it worked—or I should say, didn't really work—for my family, because I was a dominating player in the game. My family was rocked by a set of traumas during my twenties that had the effect of almost totally incapacitating me. Finally, we went to family therapy, and I was an unrelenting monitor, which totally undermined the purpose. That was all the more unfair because I had caused all of them a good deal of extra stress in those years.

The good thing about that set of family therapy sessions was that they led me ultimately to a therapist who let me talk and talk and talk about the host of memories that were repeating themselves so oppressively in my mind at that time, and the process of talking so much about them accomplished a good deal of healing. I went to one therapist before this one, but none of that therapy had helped me much. The style of my sessions with this therapist, in which I would talk and cry about all of my memories, seemed to be just what I didn't know I'd been waiting for.

This set of “terrible twenties” years really started for me with the issue of going to college. I absolutely dreaded the idea. Once again, I was thrown into turmoil about leaving home. I'd never really liked the idea of going away to college, but I'd always known that my parents were determined that I should go. They thought education was hugely important in life, and there was just no question for them but that I was going. My dad also felt that going to college had turned his life around, and he thought it would do the same for me.

All I really wanted to do at this point in my life, though, was to get a job in LA, ideally working in the entertainment industry, which I knew so much about and had great entrée to because of my father, and then to get married and start a family. My dad found it hard to believe that I wasn't dying to go away to school, but I didn't feel that way at all. Friends have told me how relieved they were to be able to get away from high school and start a new life at college, or were just eager to move on by that point. I never had any desire whatsoever to go to college, and the way I interpreted all of the pressure to go to school was that it wasn't good enough just to be me. All the pressure made me upset that my parents couldn't accept me just as I was.

Eventually I did complete my applications, and I left for college by plane at 2:00
P.M.
on Saturday, August 6,1983. I was seventeen and woefully unprepared. I had such intense separation anxiety that I returned home six times the first semester. Every month I'd be knocking on the door, and my parents were beside themselves. I had a $750 phone bill from calls home to friends. In my mind, my college experience was broken up into three distinct parts, ending up with a sum total of six years and one week of time there from start to finish.

When I was actually on campus, I went wild. I lived in a huge high-rise coed dorm, and there were parties all the time. I met people from all over the country, especially the Midwest and Chicago, and got to know a girl who had grown up in Saudi Arabia. I had fun, and I enjoyed getting to know so many new people. But I really wanted to be home. I kept my emotional distance from my new life, never really committing fully to it. Just when I should have been going through the process of separation from my immediate family, I was instead being pulled back home by my memory.

When I began to do less well in my classes than I had hoped, memories of Westlake and how I'd felt like such a failure there began to play relentlessly in my head. Once again I felt thrown by academic pressure. Every time I saw the disappointment on the faces of my professors, my mind would flash to the vision of me sitting at home struggling with school assignments that made no sense to me. I tried to fight the memories off by calling up the good times at St. Michael's in sixth grade, but I couldn't beat back the relentless replaying of the bad times.

On top of that, I put on weight, as so many people do when they go to college, and when I went home, my mother harped about that. All the memories through the years of her nagging me about my weight were triggered, and they began to haunt me again relentlessly. Maybe that should have made me thrilled about being off on my own, but I felt nothing like that.

By the end of that first year, I wanted to go home for the summer, but because during the last semester I had contracted pleurisy, a lung disease, and had to take incompletes, I had to stay for summer school. When I finally did get back home on July 7, I was determined not to go back, and for some time I didn't.

In the fall of 1984, I started classes at the local community college, and being back at home allowed me to calm down and find some emotional equilibrium. By the fall of 1985, when I had been home for a year, I dropped all the weight I had gained and began to feel a little better about myself. I seemed to have reached a sort of balance again. My memories were still incredibly insistent, but I was feeling better about myself and learning to come to terms better with the phenomenon in my head. That relative peace didn't last long, though.

On Thursday, March 14, 1985, my dad came home and told us he was going back to the William Morris Agency. The first thing I said to him was, “The Beverly Hills office, right?” He looked at me in anticipation of the storm he knew would come and said, “No, they want me to head the television department in New York.” I was shocked. If he had been summoned back to New York in the first years after we had moved to California, I would have been overjoyed. But at this point, the news was devastating.

The fear of leaving and the anxiety of starting all over again overwhelmed me. It didn't matter that I was nearly twenty years old. The feeling that all of my memories from our years in LA would be ripped away was more than I could bear. I was thrown into such turmoil that in July, my parents decided that rather than moving the whole family right away, they would wait until Michael graduated from high school in 1987. For the next two years, my father would commute back and forth, and then we would all move. Among other factors, they had decided to live apart so I would have time to come to terms with the move. Though I wish I could say that I had convinced them not to do so, that I had overcome my anxieties and agreed to go, in truth I was hugely relieved. I desperately wish I had been able to grapple with my memory and win the fight to let go, but it was no contest. I accepted their decision gratefully.

For that year, my dad lived in New York and came back to California one week a month. My mom flew back and forth often. The stress on them and on my brother was terrible. My brother, who had always been stable and responsible, began to be rebellious and difficult. He would go off with friends and lie to my parents about where he had been, and he started rebelling in other ways too.

Finally the strain was too much for my parents, and in the summer of 1986 they told us that by the end of the summer or early fall, we were moving to New York. On July 29, 1986, I went to New York with the purpose of going down to Washington, D.C., to explore the possibility of transferring to American University. I was emotionally exhausted from worrying about the move and about all of the problems that I was causing my family, feeling guilty and ashamed that I was unable to get over my fears.

I was forcing them to choose between my desperate need to stay, which neither they nor I really understood, and the happiness of the rest of the family. After months of the stress, I was so distraught and conflicted that when I was sent back to California after the trip, I found myself hoping the plane would crash because I couldn't stand the intensity of the situation anymore. As a month passed, I resigned myself to the fact that we were moving to New York. However, fortunately just then there was a shake-up in the William Morris Beverly Hills office, and they needed my dad back in California. On September 4, 1986, he called me and said, “I'm coming home. We're not going to move to New York.” What enormous relief I felt.

Secure in the knowledge that my family was in LA to stay, I suddenly found myself able, even somewhat eager, to return to college. I had found emotional equilibrium again. The day I left to go back to college, January 12, 1987, was one of the few times in my life that I felt I was starting with a clean slate and felt good about that. I believed that everything bad was behind me, all wrapped up. I'd gone through the trauma of almost moving, and it had worked out that my family was staying and my life wasn't going to be disrupted. In addition, my parents had agreed that I could bring my car to college, and I was getting an apartment, so I was confident that the school experience was going to be much better. I could never have anticipated the family crisis that came next—this time a life-or-death battle that taught me a great deal about just how transient our lives are, no matter how firm a grip of memory we have over them.

One of my real regrets in life is that my mother and I fought so much when I was growing up. She had been extremely close to her own mother, and they had a mutually supportive, symbiotic relationship. In fact, the morning after my parents got married, my grandmother, whom I always called Nana, and her sister, Elsie, showed up at my parents' hotel room with shopping bags filled with deli food. My mother didn't think anything of it, and my father knew from that day on that he'd have to make room for Nana in our lives too. Though my mother and I have also been extremely close, the way my mother harped on me about my weight meant that I didn't feel the same kind of unconditional support she and her mother had felt for one another. By this time, the slightest comment from her that I took to be critical would send me into a rage, and we'd have a horrible fight. That's just what happened during Passover 1987.

On Friday, April 10, I came home from college for the holiday. I had contracted an eye infection that was so severe I couldn't open my eyes and had to be walked onto the airplane. On Saturday, my dad almost had to carry me to the doctor. That was the least of my worries that holiday, though.

Monday night, April 13, 1987, was the first night of Passover. My grandparents, my parents, my brother, and I were leaving to head to our family friends' Beverly and Danny's house when an argument broke out between me and my mom. Everyone left while my mother and I got into a terrible fight, and she stunned me into silence when, all of a sudden, she blurted out, “You know, I just want you to know that I went to the doctor, and I'm very sick, and my carotid artery could explode at any time. So keep it up. Keep screaming and making things worse, so it could maybe make my neck explode.”

Anger can change to regret in a split second and that was what happened. I stood there in the kitchen horrified as she explained that the doctors didn't know exactly what was wrong. It turned out that her health problems had nothing to do with her carotid artery, but she was under a great deal of emotional stress and people say crazy things in those situations. At least she had gotten my full attention. The news of her illness came out of nowhere. My parents hadn't wanted to upset me, so I had heard and seen no clues. All of a sudden, wham! Everything just stopped. I stopped. My mom stopped. The fight stopped. And as I recall that moment, time stopped.