The Curse of a Good Memory

First of all, it makes everyone hate you at parties. We all know that it’s downright rude to correct the person who’s standing next to you holding a glass of white wine when she says, “for him and I.”  Grammar is one thing.  But sometimes the problem is facts, and facts matter.

I was in a situation recently where someone noted that film director Douglas Sirk’s magnificent film Imitation of Life—the heartbreaking story of the saintly African-American maid, Annie Johnson, whose light-skinned daughter grows (rightly) envious of the casual privilege of her white employers—was made in 1934.

Yes, there happens to be a version of Imitation of Life that was made in 1934, with Claudette Colbert. But there is no way that anybody who knew anything about Douglas Sirk could think that he would have had anything to do with it. (I know, I know: casually-dismissive disdain: I’ve told you I am the chief of sinners.)

1934? Come on: the year after the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act, just two years before the 1936 sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan—the very middle of the great inaugural arc of New Deal legislation? The schtick here, I am told, is that the white lady employer becomes rich marketing her maid’s famous pancake recipe—a good old boot-strappy Depression-era plot device if I’ve ever seen one.

But Douglas Sirk? All those rich, velvety mid-century interiors, replete with mirrors to emphasize reflections, and false appearances, and false projections? The panoply of material wealth and fierce postwar optimism, mixed with the film’s own desire to seem racially progressive, while being actually paternalistic? Mahalia Jackson singing the mournful closing funeral dirge? How could it be anything other than 1959—right on the doorstep of the 60s and the Civil Rights movement?

Yes, I have been that tiresome party person.

But a good memory sometimes makes everyone love you at parties: That time at the skating rink in 1979 when you were with your cousin and all the girls were in the bathroom in their Gloria Vanderbilt jeans putting on Bonne Bell lip gloss and talking about who they “liked” while “Video Killed the Radio Star” played on the PA. You can remember every detail, exactly.

As fun as that all can be, a good memory poses particular problems when relating to one’s immediate family members. Sometimes this is pretty trivial. One thing that drives me crazy is that random family members will call me up when they are mailing packages or cards, even if I am at work, and ask me to narrate the street addresses or phone numbers of our other relatives. Ditto for birthdays.

Haven’t you ever heard of WhitePages.com? I want to tell them.

But there are other, more serious problems posed by a good memory: the recollection of your older siblings’ own adolescence and young adulthood, along with specific, embarrassing examples that are generally not worth mentioning, since the one or two times you tried, you met with the same incredulous reaction: You’re making that up, they say. 

So far better it is to remain mute, like Cassandra, sunken in your old ghosts whose outlines you remember exactly.

And then there’s this kind of thing, a record of how my mind works in the middle of the night on a surprisingly regular basis:

Yasir Arafat…Yasir Arafat…Yasir Arafat…Signed the accord in 1993. September, right? And Hillary Clinton gave his wife Suha a hug at some point, and that was a very big deal, right? But when was Itzhak Rabin assassinated? His wife’s name was Leah, right?

Then again, sometimes the good memory gets turned back on you, to your own detriment.  Here is a real, personal example:

When I was in boarding school, I was passing friends with one of the vaunted and good-looking New York Upper East Side girls, who was rich and well-connected but also honestly kind and open-minded, and with whom I hung out in the dorm late nights after sign-in. Although I was clearly not one of the Beautiful People—and if you’re one, you know what this means—she was interested in what I had to say.

At the time, I was deeply interested in Billie Holiday, and my dorm room resonated night and day with the staticky echoes of a cassette tape of her songs on my boom box. (Which—curse of a good memory again—we called a “ghetto blaster.”)

Under my aegis, this girl became a fan of Billie Holiday as well. And one evening she came bursting up the stairs to tell me that she had skipped lacrosse practice, taken the bus into Boston, and gone to the Strawberries to buy her own Billie Holiday album.

Thirty years later, it is still a tribute I treasure deeply. Unfortunately, when I later had an opportunity to be in touch with the girl—who had become a somewhat notable actress on an HBO series—she did not remember the incident, or me. 

And yet still it happened. And I remember.

A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Caroline Langston is a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is a widely published writer and essayist, a winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered.