Ninety-nine percent of us have, from time to time, lamented our faulty memories. We misremember facts, misplace our possessions, and forget entire events, all things that hurt us and our relationships with others. Memory can even so thoroughly convince us of the truth of a thing that we must be presented with irrefutable proof before we will admit we were wrong. But what if we were capable of improving memory? What if we could ensure that nothing we experienced was ever forgotten? Wouldn't we leap at that opportunity, to experience, with perfect clarity, life's highlights? We might, but Ms. Price would not recommend it.
Jill Price has a remarkable oddity in her brain, a malformation which has supercharged her capacity to save and access Autobiographical Memory, a type of human memory which helps to put life's experiences in something like a chronological and sortable order. If you were asked to remember important events which happened to you in 2001, or to recall the restaurant at which you celebrated your birthday in 1998, or to remember where it was that you last wore your black jeans, you would be using Autobiographical Memory to find an answer. Customarily, memories, or access to them, fade with time, a fact most of us find annoying, but Ms. Price's case provokes another theory. Perhaps memories fade with time because they must in order for us to remain sane.
Ms. Price can remember every experience that has happened to her since her childhood. She can remember the discord of every fight, the sting of every disappointment, the hurt of every social wound. She can remember them in such vivid detail that she re-experiences the emotions attached to those memories each time she recalls them. Ms. Price's condition is extraordinarily rare and perhaps this is why we idealize perfect recall, because we dream only of its advantages, settling arguments, performing better on tests, killing at dinner parties, and not its aforementioned disadvantages which would surely cripple most of us who endured such unfiltered life.
Perhaps memories fade with time because memories are inextricably linked with emotion. It matters not if emotion is imbedded in the memories themselves, or the process of recalling the memories triggers the emotion. Everything from elation to agony is there, an unhealed wound. And if, on a daily basis, we were forced to endure our life's highs and lows, in perfect clarity mind, would we not go a little bit insane? Thought of this way, the evanescence of memory may be a self-defense mechanism, protection against re-experiencing trauma that would handicap us. Could Ms. Price be disabled, not blessed? It's an odd way of looking at such a remarkable gift, but Ms. Price's enthralling description of her battles with her own memory, as she tries to carve out a life for herself that is something like emotionally stable, convinces that it does hamper more than it thrills, that it hurts more than it helps, and that we shouldn't be so quick to ask for what we can't possibly understand.
This Is quality work with a compelling premise and a well-argued conclusion. (4/5 Stars)
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