on memory and storytelling

for me, the important reason to have this family blog is to share and thereby preserve our family stories. i'm reading a wonderful book by siri hustvedt--her best-known book is the wonderful what i loved and she's also known for being paul auster's wife. she has a new book out called the sorrows of an american. or actually, from what it looks like on amazon, it will soon be released. what's strange is that i bought it in a bookshop in the oslo airport last friday, in paperback, so it is released some places. like oslo, i guess. i'm already nearly finished with it, since i can scarcely put it down. her prose is simply luminous. i find myself constantly underlining passages because she has put some thought or other that i've long had so succinctly and given voice to what i feel as MY thoughts and feelings. i feel she's speaking directly to me. it's wonderful when an author does that.

the central preoccupation of the book is memory and it centers on a minnesota family of norwegian heritage (which might be why it was released first in oslo). it takes me back to growing up in platte and although this family has many secrets and i don't experience our family that way, it makes me feel that this family space in which to share our stories is that much more important.

i want to simply share some of the wonderful thought-provoking quotes from the book:

"there is no clear border between remembering and imagining."

"memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. it isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words."

"i try to talk about the way we organize perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles and ends...our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're reimagined in words."

"that is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed."

"we make our narratives, and those created stories can't be separated from the culture in which we live."

i find this book thought-provoking as i desire to put down and preserve family stories in this electronic medium. of course, they will be necessarily filtered in the telling, their tapestry woven by the various storytellers who (i hope) will tell them. i look forward to the texture of that tapestry unfolding here in cyberspace.

please start sharing soon.