Blogs and Stories
Memories in the Facebook Age
Richard Rushfield was confident his new memoir of his college years was accurate, until old friends and enemies started contradicting and questioning his memories on their Facebook profiles.
Around 2004, I began writing the memoirs of my wayward college years in the mid-1980s. My writing was initially inspired by news of the death of one of my old classmates. It had been more than a decade since I had last seen my friend, whom I call Frank in the book—and his death from a drug overdose came after years spent adrift, floating through life; a road that many of my peers had taken. On learning of Frank’s death, my thoughts drifted back to those chaotic times 20 years ago, when the party of the ’70s and ’80s had given way to the earnestness of the ’90s, and many of my generation, caught between the two eras, had made their stand by checking out in a nihilistic wave that would become known as grunge.
No sooner had I started a group on the portal for my book then the old fingers started pointing again, the very people portrayed in my book as constantly at each other’s throat, appeared again, 20 years later, all their ill will and resentment intact.
Looking back in time, I saw that in that brief moment, something had been permanently knocked loose for many of my peers, and I began writing my book to figure out what it had been. When I started writing, I was only in contact with a handful of college acquaintances, and reflecting back on my wayward youth, reading through old papers and journals, became a pleasantly wistful bit of therapy.
And then along came Facebook.
Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the ’80s. By Richard Rushfield. 304 pages. Gotham. $26.
When the social-networking portal appeared on my radar around 2006 and a handful of old acquaintances turned up, it was at first a huge aid to my research. Suddenly others who were present were at my fingertips to compare notes, lost memories were reclaimed, as though the floodwaters suddenly receded and revealed sunken neighborhoods. Tales rushed back into my consciousness of late-night raids on unguarded campus refrigerators, of unauthorized concerts in dorm basements, of obscure, barely understood critical theory texts whose layers of meaning were debated until dawn. The words flowed into my manuscript as I struggled to keep up with the recovered memories.
But they didn’t stop. As more people came aboard the site and as word of my book got out among them, the memories kept coming. And not just memories, but pictures, photographic evidence—much of it contradicting things that I had locked down for certain as part of my past. Campus icons remembered turned out to be very different from what one had pictured, or turned out not to have been enrolled during a semester in question, or, worse still, when one talked with them via Facebook messages, their personalities and perspectives turned out to be nothing at all like the cartoon sketches in my imagination.
In the post-James Frey era, no memoirist can write without making every effort to doublecheck one’s own past. But when the past becomes a moving target, how is one to nail it down? Suddenly the hordes of my youth flooded out of the fog like a zombie army, opening up Facebook accounts and filling in their profiles, and at every turn, I entered some unmapped alleyway.
Worse still, the act of memoir writing is supposed to be a reflective, distanced act; holding the past at arm’s length to study and poke at it, as a tea-soaked madeline evokes sensations from afar. But in the narcissistic social-media age, when we collectively catalog and curate every moment and preference of our lives, one can’t get far enough from one’s self to have any thoughts larger than “OMG, I looked humungous in that! What was I thinking?”
Greater challenges were still to come, however. As word of the book in progress spread even further via the Facebook jungle drums, old acquaintances began not just to share their stories, but to ask, “So what are you saying about me in this book? You are not telling the story about the time we—, are you?” Or worse still, the dreaded question, “What do you mean I’m not in it?”
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nortonclybourn
Every time we pull out a memory, we edit it and spin it. In the past, most of us have had to confront past realities only fleetingly. Social media may be affecting our editorial control of our memories as much as it has changed he substance of our mementos, from shoeboxes full of old letters to digital postings.
mzkitti
Facebook... like many sites on the Internet is filled with lies. I suspect that ninety percent of what people post are untruths. People lie and ten days later forget what they said.
That is the trouble with lies.
ewebber
Seriously? 300 pages of "And there was that one time that we heckled those frat guys from Dartmouth. Man, we really showed them!" I couldn't even get through his one paragraph synopsis without dozing off. Twice.
ck-390
Agreed. This book sounds incredibly lame.
suzanne710
I've read the book--it's funny, smart, thoughtful, and certainly not as insular as one might imagine. It's for anyone with an interest in shifting cultures and ideas, rather than just those who went to college with the author some 20 years ago.
LordZim
It is not incredibly lame. I'm halfway done with "Don't Follow Me" and find it hilarious, well-written, and very self-aware. But hey -- it's terrific and very brave of you both to post off-the-cuff, uninformed, anonymous dismissals. We the Internet can't wait to read your books.
msw444
Anyone who attempts a memoir (I published one that vanished into the 57,000 other books published in 1997), soon realizes that there is no such thing as 'the truth'. Every story is a version of a memory unconsciously nudged by needs barely recognized. Every sentence is (at best) an attempt to escape the undertow of vanity, or the need for dramatic staging, or an attempt to create "atmosphere". Even when the writer presents himself as an anti-hero, it's unlikely that anybody who knew him would ever describe the writer (or the situation) as the writer describes himself. Some truth can actually be approached, by wandering away from what at first looks something like absolutely indelible facts, but even about "the facts", there can be very little agreement.
aperturemad
I can't even imagine how much the world would have lost had Proust worried about such things. Your memories are just as valid as anyone elses, in fact maybe more so because you strive for the "truth". Relax. Enjoy your success
MurrayAbraham
Paul Newman prefaced an interview for the "making of" of Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid thusway:
"I recently had a gathering with the members of my WWII bomber crew, and none of us had the same recollection of our time together. Memory is a tricky thing and what I will say about the movie is MY recollection of it."
leonfreilich
MALE MENOPAWS
Need to unclog
Those crowded arteries?
Chase choice chicks
At Christmas parteries.
DBFan2009
ahhhh - a good time to reflect on history books, ALL history books, not just "memoirs."
i always find it amusing when i see reports on TV or read an article about some events that went on during the 60s and/or the 70s, some of which i either attended personally or followed closely in the news at the time, and how those events are skewered and turned upside down by today's pundits, commentators or historians who weren't even born at the time.
even the interpretation of actual newsreel footage takes a hit as to how certain incidents were thought of at the time.
i shudder to think how public school history books treat the same time period.
esksmith
I'm a senior in college now and even memories from earlier college years have a different perspective on them then when I was first experiencing the events. For example a diary entry from my sophomore year expresses different emotions than what I feel now about that event. College is a time of mental growth and maturation. I don't feel the same about anything, or anyone for very long because I reflect, and my motivations (for classes, relationships, life-plans) change and so do those of my friends and acquaintances. So what is really the "truth" of those experiences? I would argue that the truth is all the interpretations of those experiences, but that is probably not practical for a novel/memoir.
You might be writing the memoir as a 20-yr graduate looking back, or in the voice of one experiencing everything for the first time. Or something in between. But it's your decision, and it's your memoir.
Fact checking of course is a must, no writer wants to put events in where they never existed, but memories are malleable, so just write your book.
whitegraypoppy
I listen to it all the time. Loose memories garnished with romanticized accounts either to make stories funnier or the storyteller central and in contrast to the mute and unwilling characters in his black and white background. 80%-90% is poppycock. You can do it for a living or while other people's time away at boring parties. Truth Lies = Entertainment
whitegraypoppy
Save for Alzheimers or non-premeditated memory gap, writers should be pardoned after a confrontational authentication of his accounts. Otherwise, learn to recant and refile under "Fiction"
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