The Fabrication of Memories

In writing about her first piano lesson, Patrcia Hempl creates many fabrications which she admits towards the end of the essay. At the end of the essay, she offers an explanation as to why she fabricated the vignette at the beginning of the essay. She states, ” We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over a period of time… but that’s the implacable judgement of feeling.” She had stated how this was her first draft and that she wrote only what she wanted to remember even if it actually occurred in that particular way or not. She also writes about how no one owns the past, and that it is highly dangerous not to inhabit memory. At the end she writes, ” To write one’s life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form….”.