Memory and the fictional imagination

creating memories

Peter Childs

pp. 63-66

in: Sebastian Groes (ed), Memory in the twenty-first century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

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.