Remembering the past from the present

The narrative of a memoir is always from the perspective of someone looking into their past, thinking about key moments of their life. Sometimes those memories are clear, sometimes they’re vague.

It's my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona town whose name I never knew.

The Glass Castle(2005)

Sometimes, memoir writers will use memory as part of their storytelling. They'll use how well they remember something to highlight what was important to their younger selves. Or maybe it was something traumatic—they may use what they can't remember to illustrate how bad things were for them.

Let’s look at some examples based on the snippet.

I remember everything up until the accident. We’d enjoyed a pancake breakfast and dad was driving us to soccer training. We were fighting on the back seat as usual when Dad swore and I felt the car suddenly swerve. The rest of the day was a blurred mix of shapes, smells and pain.

It may sound selfish, but my favourite memory of my fifth birthday party was that I was given a Bumblebee doll that was nearly the same height as me. I can’t remember who gave me the huge Transformer, but I know I said ‘thank you’ before mum needed to remind me.

Write about a memory from long ago. Give it a set up (present tense) and talk about what you clearly and vaguely remember (past tense).

Memoir Basics 1: What's in a memoir?

Remembering the past from the present