A few notes on memory and self: Jenny Sinclair

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards…” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass)

The things you forget.

I’ve forgotten Mike Feury. I can’t remember a thing about him; how I came across him, what we talked about in our letters, how I felt when I saw his handwriting on an envelope amongst my mail. I’ve forgotten the laughter at his jokes and the sadness at his sorrows. I may even have forgotten his face; I don’t know, because I don’t know if I ever saw it.
Mike has been waiting for me for years, a handful of letters folded up and shoved into a cardboard box in the storage space in my roof, waiting mutely while downstairs I married, renovated, had a child. He’s been up there for five years; before that, the boxes were in the second-bedroom wardrobe of my single-girl flat; before that, stacked up in the study of yet another rental share house.
A few weeks back, I was in the roof looking for a book; I unfolded a wad of photocopied paper and found a letter beginning: “Mike, sweetheart, before you get upset at this, I’d like to make something clear…” It’s in my handwriting, but I don’t remember writing it, and I don’t remember Mike.
I have a face in my mind, a slightly puffy, just-past-handsome face, a man who has spent too long in the pub, in general and possibly that very afternoon, a Dublin man, wearing a softly hanging suit with dishevelled hair and no guile in his eyes. That’s the face a man named Mike Feury should have, but I can’t remember the real man.
There are only a handful of the letters, mostly his, and that one of mine that I thought important enough to copy before I sent it. They run into the thousands of words, and by the lack of elisions and corrections, I suspect we both thought them through, or even redrafted before putting pen to paper. But I don’t remember.


It was 1990, almost twenty years ago, but that’s no excuse. We signed our letters “love”, peppered them with jokes and teasing, a light-hearted seasoning for the real work of telling each other who we were. There must have been some discussion about our both being Geminis, because he wrote me a letter in two colours of ink, from Mike and Michael to Jenny and Jennifer; he told me, too, about his woman in Canada, the longing and the reluctance to commit; I spent pages dissecting a past love affair and why it had mad me cautious of those who felt strongly about me. We discussed books, Irish v. Australian culture, share houses, dingy flats we’d known (he called them “kips”), and what we hoped our lives would one day be.
If I strain, I think I can remember that he existed. But that’s all. And it frightens me, that I can care enough about someone to write to them, to take the risk of speaking my truth to them, and then forget them altogether.

The things you don’t forget.

When someone says “I’ll never forget”, can they mean it? Can they know what will stick in the amber of memory and what will crumble, fade, slip away into darkness?
These are some things I haven’t, and won’t, forget: the happily rolling haunches of a small yellow dog running ahead of me through the grass when I was 15; the physical sickness that was grief in autumn ten years ago this year; the stale tobacco smell that somehow matched my Pa’s yellowed skin as he sat in his smoking chair; and the smallest thing you could think of: the sound of a dog barking in the background as a woman spoke on talkback radio one dark Melbourne evening. I was listening in the car, stuck in traffic, and I thought: no one else in the world will remember that sound in five minutes. And somehow that made me feel I ought to try, and I have.
“I’ll never forget” can mean a neat filing away of a fact, or it can mean that person, that place, has performed such surgery on your soul that it has changed and you carry it in who you are. Some of the things I’ll never forget are things I have tried to forget: the end-over-end tumbling of a car down a hill at 100 ks an hour; a surgeon saying, kind but matter-of-fact: “It is cancer”; my lover saying, of the woman he’d “met”, “I feel it here, you know?” with his hand on his heart, the heart I thought was mine. These are memories I believe I’d be better off without; I don’t need analysis, I need to get on with life, but they are things I’ll never forget because they are part of me. I could as easily forget how to work, or more precisely, forget how I walk.

But then: If those memories are me, what was I before them? Who was the 24-year-old who wrote to Mike Feury if the 42-year-old is composed of what has happened since?
There’s so much to remember. It seems quite natural to me that old people forget. Either the storehouse, the space in their roof, is full, or the machinery for clearing out old memories to admit the new is rusting out. If we are just our memories, wouldn’t a 90-year-old be far more of a person than a child of nine? And that’s not so. My memories are me, and they’re not.
Memory can’t be trusted. It’s all we have, but it can’t be trusted. I don’t mean remembering to turn the gas off when you leave the house, or remembering your mother’s birthday. I mean the record of days, the jumbled pile of photographs in the mind, the idea of what has happened and why.
I’ve tried writing. Writing doesn’t help. Journal pages written into infinity can’t capture immanence, the now and now and now. All writing does is favour one moment over another, turn life into a story we can read, a letter from one person to another, (which can still be forgotten, up in the roof), but it is not memory as such. All writing does is point out that memory can’t be trusted.
So Mike’s letters, which are all of Mike now, slap me in the face. They say: “You think you know who you are, but look! You forgot this.”
(Some other letters further down the box, from other people in England and Ireland, explain Mike to me: in those pre-Internet days I must have placed an ad in the contact magazine of a club I was in, seeking friends in Europe for a visit I hoped to make: Mike was one of those who responded, but so much more. Still, I never went to see him.)
I wrote the letters at night: Friday nights, at a strange part-time job I had, sitting alone in a large office building all night, supervising a computer backup, changing tapes every hour or so. I didn’t just write to Mike: I wrote to friends and former lovers interstate, overseas, to my boyfriend who I’d see the next day, to anyone I wanted to talk to at 2 am, but couldn’t. I didn’t have much to do in that job; otherwise, I guess the letters would have been shorter.
They were written in the intensity and other-worldness of the caffeinated fluorescent-lit hours between 10pm and 4am. When I read the letter to Mike, I pick out nice phrases, pieces of honesty that I recognise: “Like many people, I have a subconscious which insists on judging event and other people by what has happened in the past. I’m aware of it, don’t much like it, but arguing with one’s subconscious is akin to using logic to sort out a situation in a dream. It doesn’t work.”
This is an analytical person with strong feelings, feelings she doesn’t want to deny, but which she would also like to pin down and control. I know that was me then, and that is the person I still am today.
I am the same person and I’m not. The test is to put these women side by side: compare and contrast. It’s an exercise that scares me a bit, makes me feel like a mother about to be judged a daughter.
Because it’s not just Mike I’d forgotten: it’s the personal honesty, the willingness to be exposed and judged, to walk around emotionally naked of defences. I don’t have those things any more: in their place are internalised social expectations, tricks I picked up over the years to allow me to function in this structured world as a worker, wife and mother. I know what she would say about that: You’re fake.
But there are things she did that I blush to remember, things I know I did, but cannot remember why. I’m talking about that cliché of the fool exposed: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Take, say the three years before and three years after I turned 21, up to around the time I wrote to Mike.
These are the things I did: I stole. I lied. I cheated on my boyfriend. I drove a car drunk enough and fast enough to kill (but didn’t). I wasted days and weeks stoned and drunk, attending on men who didn’t deserve me.
These things seemed like a good idea at the time, and I, the newly minted parent of, say the years between 37 and 42, who five years into motherhood is just beginning to appreciate the scale of a life and what it means to be responsible for one, wants to take that girl and shake her.
But I also know: she wouldn’t listen. This is a paradox of youth: at 21 you are immortal, but you also don’t believe you’ll live to see the consequences.
And reading the earnest letter to Mike Feury, in which I told the tale of a man who felt too deeply and asked too much of me, and how I struggled with it, I know what she would say to me in reply: Look at you. Don’t you remember these things: putting love before emotional safety? Putting art before money? Putting what you know is right (equality and the state of our fragile planet, just to name two) before social ease and personal convenience?
And I’d have no reply. Because that person at 21, 24, didn’t admit to compromise, and sometimes I wonder if I should have either. I could only say in my defence: “I forgot myself.”
Forgot myself? Possibly the thing you are most likely to forget, and the thing you most need not to, is yourself.
“I forgot myself” – it’s an excuse to be offered up after bad behaviour, particularly of the insubordinate kind. It also has a lesser meaning – it can be a way of noting great joy and involvement in an experience. To forget oneself is not desirable, and yet it is. It all depends on how you go about it.
So: can I forget these 21 years and find the 21-year-old in me again, like an old snake shedding a skin? If we were only our memories, the woman of 21 would be half the one of 42. She was me, but she wasn’t just me minus 21 years. She had things I’ve lost.
That creaking machinery keeps moving things through. I’m 42 and the storehouse already feels like it’s packed to the rafters, boxes at the back never to be opened again, no matter how precious their contents seemed when they were packed away. And I’m only halfway through (I hope). Most of my family, my mother’s family, which I know best, lived and will live well into their 80s. I am one of 13 cousins, aged from early 20s to late 40s, all still alive. I can hope for 84. As long as the cancer doesn’t get me…
Cancer. Oh yes, that’s right. I nearly forgot. I had, past tense deliberate, had, don’t have any more, cancer. Just a common kind, though uncommonly early. Exactly the kind of thing one wants to forget and can’t. But the good days are those when I forget the constant threat and make plans for one, five, ten years’ time. The good days are also those when I keep in mind that life is a limited – what – not a limited thing or commodity. Life is all. There’s nothing else, or so I (dis)believe – anyway, the days when I know that life is limited are the best.
When I was in chemotherapy, I started writing a short novel. It didn’t hang together all that well, but I remain fond of the characters, particularly Marion, a suburban housewife who left it all behind and hit the road in a blue Kombi van. She’d had cancer too, but she wasn’t me: she was older, had lived less widely, knew less about herself. But we had this in common: she didn’t want to be a dying woman. But she wanted to live as if she was.
Cancer isn’t me. The memory of cancer isn’t me. Memories in general aren’t me. And cancer isn’t a gift, any more than it is a punishment for some obscure sin of attitude, as some imply. It’s often pressed into service as an easy metaphor for the hidden rot, for the weed that must be cut off at the base, then dug out and poisoned.
Although the treatments may resemble all these, it’s just a disease. To me, the interesting bit is remission: the time when you clearly know you may or may not die. This makes you no different to anyone else walking around out there with a bullet/bus/cartoon safe falling from the sky in their future: no different, but more aware. Memento mori.
It seems, from reading my angry, passionate, analytical letter, that Mike had thrown down a challenge, had asked me to drop the defences and let him help me with my inner turmoil. Perhaps he finally has.
Now, at 42, I know for sure I’m not immortal. Like the illusion of immortality, this lends bravery and perhaps it will help me to face that 21-year-old again.
She still won’t listen, because there are memories we’ll never have in common. (I wonder for a moment what I’ll have to say to myself-of-42 when I’m 63, 84, and I resolve to try to listen to the future.) She’ll never listen, but perhaps we can join hands against the compromises, and the mistakes that come out of forgetfulness of the self.
The immortal self and the very mortal do have this in common: a commitment to life without concern for consequences. It’s a kind of anti-cancer – the years in between of doing the right thing, of ticking off society’s boxes, were a remission from my self.


Perhaps she and I can install in our shared identity a little 84-year-old woman, approaching the end but with a lifetime of memories of principles upheld, risks taken and truth respected, and whenever I’m about to hold my tongue, do my duty, let a sexist/racist comment pass, whenever I have to choose between my instincts and the voices of conformity, she can rap me over the knuckles and say sharply: “Remember yourself!”