Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

Here, in memory, we live and die.