I start probably half of my conversations by saying, “I heard on a podcast…”
Recently, I listened to an episode of No Stupid Questions called Why do we forget so much of what we’ve read? It featured the regular hosts, psychologist Angela Duckworth and economist Stephen Dubner, discussing the extent to which they have forgotten details — and even major plot points — from some of their very favorite books.
When the titular question was raised, I was incredulous: surely I remember the books I love! But the more I listened, the more I realized they were right. I can remember these books, the way they felt in my hands, where I was when I read them, whether they were library books or borrowed or purchased or a gift. In many cases, though, I couldn’t recall the name of the main character without great effort. I’d be able to look up the title with minimal googling and probably have a haunting sense of deja vu the entire time if I were to read them again. But if I had to recount their stories in much detail, I would be unable to.
This blew my mind.
I know every beat of the stories I’ve written by the time I’ve worked through them a dozen times in the editing process, of course. But even in my own manuscripts, I forget the names of characters or the ordering of events after writing the first draft — and these are details I labor over! It pains me to think that no one will recall the details of my writing any more than I do my favorite books, but I can’t ask for what I can’t give.
Once I got over the cringe of regret and failure for my forgetfulness, I decided that this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Anyone who loves to read knows the feeling we’re chasing: the daze of emerging from another world, the way it haunts you when it’s over. Very few stories achieve this.
The books that stay with me long after I’ve forgotten them are not similar to each other. For some, I had to urge myself past cliched plot points or underdeveloped characters to reach the depths of despair or heights of elation that they ultimately delivered. For others, the revelation that the events in the story were largely true in the endnotes recast it all in a new light. Sometimes, the story was simple but the writing so beautiful that I lovingly flip through the pages even now, years later, reading a single simile at a time.
A book doesn’t have to be everything to be great. It can in fact be deeply flawed and still succeed! The power of these many stories, fictional or otherwise — the unnameable quantity that makes them stick with me for years — has to do with the emotions they evoke. Nostalgia, pain, love — it need not be a feeling I approached the book in search of, but if it hit me hard enough, it changed me. I have felt desire stronger in a YA novel than in my own life. I have grieved nearly as much for a fictional character as for my own loved ones. It is that magic that keeps us reaching for the next book, that lets us live lives we’d never want but which we crave.
So, no, I don’t remember why I felt the way I did. I remember the moment in which I felt so strongly, and the book in my hands at the time. That is what I strive for as an author, and will only occasionally succeed in reaching.
I build castles out of hundreds of pages, lovingly crafting dozens of imagined people with inner lives the reader will never see, and hope that in the moment when they are at their lowest or most exultant, the readers will feel it too.