🌻 internet archive
memoir, memory, how we make sense
When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self.
— Milan Kundera, “Immortality”
When I open my Photos app, I’m greeted by a carousel of snapshots from the last ten years of my life. A collage of pictures with my roommate Victoria, from Chengdu night markets to college graduation. A “Best of” album for March 2017, which features contextless pictures of debate practice, a vegetable omelet, and the parking spot for my old car. A side-by-side comparison of a blurry selfie I took four years ago and one I took today. A video of my shaky hands. Between slides, I’m prompted to attach titles to specific days—they’ll be easier to catalog and search that way—then share the finished “memories” on social media.
Since the early days of this feature, Google has gotten much better at dealing with the quirks and stains of our personal histories. Screenshots are excluded, as are downloaded images. You can hide entire days and faces from appearing in these forced recollections, lest you get assaulted with unwelcome memories of a long-gone ex. Yet despite these endless iterations—undoubtedly micromanaged by a legion of overpaid engineers, data scientists, and product managers—I’m still amused by how random and how boring the selections seem. Google should know everything about me, yet remains utterly incompetent at pulling the memories that matter.
Perhaps having too much information makes meaning-making harder. Digital archival used to be such a conscious act. I couldn’t have my camera out constantly, since they were separate devices carried to special occasions, and not just attached to my phone and by extension my arm. Viewing pictures required removing the SD card, then inserting it into the big computer in my parents’ home office. My dad maintained a sprawling, many-forked folder of family photos, nested neatly by year, month, and day. Each December, I spent hours going through them and curating the best for a year-end PowerPoint. Sometimes I posted vacation updates to a tiny blog on Windows Live Spaces, or picked a few to attach in an email to my grandparents in Shanghai.
Nowadays, we’re all nonstop collecting and creating the data points of our lives. Screenshots and step trackers, cookies and calendar holds. Reviews of restaurants, movies, trails, and books. Emails, autocomplete, apps that ask you to stop and take picture at a new time each day. I don’t worry about backups because it’s all in the cloud. Updates are automatic; no need to hit “Save.” I stopped keeping a daily diary because my calendar remembers what I did from morning to night on any given date from the last eight years. In 2023, even the screen recorder and catering service I use for work sent pathetic attempts at a year in review.
Some of this is gimmicky, sure, but the trick has worked. At this point, my digital and actual records feel one and the same. In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Archive,” Charlie Squire writes about the difficulty of “deleting” an ex from her photo album: “I can bring myself to remove the most intimate photos from social media, for utilitarian and compassionate purposes, but I can’t remove them from the photo archive of my life. It would be a dangerous and elective biopsy, masses of myself that grew into and then with me, a disingenuous operation to disregard such foundational parts of the person I am now.”
One step further now: Take all this data, and multiply it by everyone you’ve ever met. There’s the digital double that lives in my phone, but also the triple, quadruple, quintuple versions that exist in everyone else’s. A Hinge conversation from a guy you ghosted. An Instagram tag from a college party. There are people who know you only by your LinkedIn headline or a mangled bit of gossip from a friend. The blur of your irises in a million CCTV cameras, hidden in corner stores, airports, and Airbnbs. Right now I’m reading the book Doppelganger, in which left-wing writer Naomi Klein reflects on the disorientation of being confused for the antivax conspiracist Naomi Wolf. When Klein loses control over her online reputation, she starts to lose hold over her sense of self too.
Who are we, if not the version of ourselves that lives in our phones? Who are we, if not our social profiles, our browser history, the first page of search results when you look up your name? I can send you my last four performance reviews, my elementary school report card, and a reference check from my landlord and my three best friends. The more information we possess about ourselves and each other, the harder it is to carve an identity out of the mess.
Memoirists reckon with this challenge more than anyone else, as they rummage through all kinds of dusty personal archives to piece together a book’s worth of biographical detail. This process is fraught with questions of literary integrity: What do you do when you can’t verify a claim? What privacy and dignity is owed to the people/characters you write about? Is your main obligation to art or to truth? I’ve been reading the disclosures in the front pages of memoirs to watch writers contend.
Consider this from Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T. Kira Madden:
While the material in this book comprises extensive research, interview content, photographs, and journals, much of it is based on memory, which is discrete, impressionable, and shaped by the body inside of which it lives.
This, in Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation:
Long before Derrida and deconstruction, the Talmud said, quite sagely, “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” As far as I am concerned, every word of this book is the complete and total truth. But of course, it’s my truth. So to protect the innocent—as well as the guilty—I have changed most names. Otherwise, unfortunately for me, every detail is accurate.
Or Chanel Miller’s Know My Name:
The fact that I spelled subpoena, suhpeena, may suggest I am not qualified to tell this story. But all court transcripts are at the world’s disposal, all news articles online. This is not the ultimate truth, but it is mine, told to the best of my ability. If you want it through my eyes and ears, to know what it felt like inside my chest, what it’s like to hide in the bathroom during trial, this is what I provide. I give what I can, you take what you need.
All three authors display the appropriate orientation toward their own memories, which is, of course, a suspicious one. Yet I wonder what compels them to write anyway, recording in naked detail the minutiae of their teenage traumas.
It’s easy to argue that the only reasons to write personally are selfish—maybe people write memoirs just to sell them. In Jia Tolentino’s “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over,” she notes that the rise in first-person confessionals coincided with the democratization of online writing and the “page-view economy… The forms that became increasingly common—flashy personal essays, op-eds, and news aggregation—were those that could attract viral audiences on the cheap.” Suddenly, no-name writers could trade a $50 check and a five-year stain on their SEO to spend a day going viral as Twitter’s main character. Or maybe people who write about themselves are just really self-important. In a recent interview with critic Merve Emre, she scolds those heedless enough to write about their families, describing it as a form of “betrayal.” Why not sublimate? she asks. Just conceal your pain in a character. Make your marriage problems a book review.
But I don’t have the heart—or the cynicism—to buy into these critiques; in fact I trust writers more when they use the word “I.” When you’ve experienced difficult things, as Madden, Wurtzel, and Miller have, it’s no throwaway feat to excavate those memories for a critical audience. There are less demanding ways to make a buck. Rather, memoir is a means to reclaim authorship over one’s perspective and identity—for the victim Emily Doe to become the artist Chanel Miller—for the world to finally know her name.
Still, extraordinary memoir doesn’t require extraordinary life. In Stay True (which lives up to the hype), Hua Hsu celebrates the common magnificence of a teenage friendship. He’s both skeptical and hopeful about the possibility of memorializing someone in the written word. Hsu writes, while preparing his elegy for his best friend’s funeral: “I needed to figure out how to describe the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you, the threshold when a pair of old boots go from new to worn, the sound of our finals week mixtape wheezing to the end of its spool.” More pointedly: “It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history.”
I think it’s okay to write through rose-colored glasses. We have so few resources for coping with life’s myriad wrongs, so little agency in the face of loss. At least afford us the ability to look back more clearly than we looked ahead.
I spent much of high school volunteering at local museums. I gave gallery tours, hosted evening events, and judged art for the teen exhibition but mostly pointed people to the restrooms down the hall. I especially loved hanging out in the museum after hours. Our docent office was usually empty, and it was lit by a big window facing the city’s downtown park. At night, I rifled through binders of background references for each exhibition, drafting new scripts and testing my routes in the vacant halls.
Most visitors don’t realize that the median museum can only show a fraction of its collection at a given time. It’s around five to twenty percent, the rest preserved but rarely displayed. Exhibits don’t rotate often, which lends profound moral weight to the decision of what story gets told. Curators dictate which artifacts get pulled from the dustbin of history to feature in glass showcases for the public eye. They choose whose narratives grace plaques and whose are left to wither on the warehouse floors. History is written by the winners, as the old adage goes.
This metaphor has always seemed important to me. We can preserve as much as we’d like, but like the miscellany that populates my photo album, most museum objects lie dead until given meaning. If you don’t tell the story of your life, someone else will do it for you. Google, Instagram, and the sketchy recollections of strangers can offer fragments of a mirrored self. You can dress up in the identities that others draw; you can outsource your memory and legacy to the highest corporate bidder. You can look back through your Oura ring, your credit score, your likes. From Charlie Squire again: “There is museum upon museum dedicated to myself within the geography of my phone, and like all museums they are fallible to misrepresentation and selective curation, and like most museum-goers I choose to believe they are peddling me an objective truth.”
Or you could refuse—and rebel—against these artificial documentarians. Take all that data, those eclectic ephemera, and instead write the story as you want it said. This is all material, yes! And thank god that it’s ours to sculpt. Indulge in wielding your curatorial hand. Self-narration is the best way—the only way—we have to piece our reflections back together, painting constellations from the chaos of the scattered night sky.
🌱 little life updates
My writing group told me that a corporate blog post didn’t count as my February submission. Harsh, but fair. Since I have a soft spot for memoirs (especially salient with the recent personal essay discourse), I spent the last few weeks on this late piece trying to understand why.
Other updates:
Reboot is hosting our first-ever Community Day on Saturday 3/23 in SF! We’ll be hosting intimate discussion groups, creative workshops, a “hot take arena,” and the launch of Kernel Issue 4. It’ll be a fun day of discourse & celebration—RSVP to come say hi!
Favorite reads from the last long leap month: Sam Kriss on love, Slate’s definitive guide to spending the 24 hours in a day, a vintage-cool writing guide, an Ada Limón poem, and Alistair Kitchen’s wonderfully creative meditation on AI and art.
I spent the last couple months working with my team to launch DMs on Substack. I’ve had the loveliest email exchanges with folks through the platform, but as I’ve shifted my reading to the app, I’ve missed the opportunity to connect at this level. Inviting you to shoot me a DM (especially if it’s a personal essay or memoir you particularly love):
Thanks for reading,
Jasmine
Mills got me reading Immortality RN!
Lovely!