MEMORY WALL

Q & A | Further Reading

Q: What was your inspiration for the title novella, which takes place in South Africa and involves the storage of memories on physical cartridges?

My grandmother’s journey through dementia was my initial inspiration for the story, but to suggest a story comes from a single place of inspiration probably oversimplifies things. McSweeney’s asked a group of writers to travel somewhere in the world and envision that place in the year 2024, so that was certainly part of it, too. And I had been reading a bit about memory and neurology at that point, and so, serendipitously, McSweeney’s offered me a great opportunity to intersect my interests in therapsid fossils in South Africa and the idea that maybe someday soon we will be able to locate specific memories in the brain and isolate them. I also injured my knee and went through surgery (and recovery!) while I was working on it, so I spent a lot of odd hours confined to a bed or a chair working on that piece.  As usual, I probably tried to take on too much: class, race, Alzheimer’s, a remote geography, geologic time scales vs. human time scales.

Q: Do you first (or ever?) allow yourself to write a sloppy, unwieldy sentence in order to simply capture the nugget of thought, a sweeping concept that you haven’t yet worked through?

 A: Yes, yes, of course! The early drafts of my sentences are always a mess. (Often the later drafts are too!) Time and sleep, those are the keys. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a 500-page novel, a novella, a short story, or a 600-word essay. You need to write sentences, go to bed, wake up the next day and reread the thing you’re trying to make. You tug, squeeze, adjust, tweak, twist; you listen to the music you made the day before. Only through the slow accretion of days can you begin to shape the sounds and shapes of your sentences around the intangible, barely-articulable thing you’re trying to say. Often you might not even know, at least at the outset, what you’re trying to say, what kind of image you’re trying to make, what kind of narrative you’re shaping. The language itself suggests it.

That’s what writing is. You end up condensing a few hundred or a thousand mornings of thinking and tinkering and researching and backtracking and wondering into your paragraphs, and then you give them to your reader and hope you’ve been generous enough that they will reward her attention.

Q: What would you say is the organizing principle of Memory Wall?

A: All of the stories approach the question of memory from a different angle. At several points I laid out the stories I hoped to include on the carpet, and reread their beginnings and endings, trying to figure out a meaningful sequence, how to move from seeds in “Village 113” to embryos in “Procreate, Generate.” Often short story collections are linked by having a common character or place run through the stories, but I wondered if I could arrange a story collection more like a suite: arrange it neurologically, thematically, around a single question: What is memory? Maybe the final product is a sextet of houses constructed around a central, hexagonal garden, which is memory, and each narrative is a bay window that looks out into that same misty, ever-changing, mysterious garden?