Memory and Peonies

On Memory and Memoir Writing

It’s the end of May, and the peonies are in bloom. I have a vase of them sitting on my long, scrubbed-topped, dining table. They began as small, blind buds, softening knots of deep pink. Within days they had opened to blowsy saucers of coral, then gradually faded first to cream, then to a lemony white, becoming increasingly colourless as they aged.

Peonies do not last well, they are fragile and fleeting, like so much of memory. While I watch them etiolate, it occurs to me that the journey from event to memory is rather like the fading of the peony. Its colour leeches away, it becomes ragged at its edges and its head is bowed. Head bowed memory must be, because most of the time we cannot insist on our truth being incontrovertible. We can offer it only in good faith, as the truth in accord with what we remember, as the partial shifting notion that it is.

Memory is uncertain, changing colour in different lights, altered by the very fact of remembering and telling over and over again. And did we remember that day on the beach, the ice cream, the towel around our shoulders or was it imprinted on our memory by a photograph or a much repeated story?

Much of memory is lost to us but at its best, in the moments that persist, it is as fat and open as the face of the peony, as bright and alive as the crimson peonies that bloomed every year in the front garden of the house we moved to when I was five.

I do not grow peonies, but I am doing my best to grow memories, or at least to attend to them, in order to retrieve and offer my story, my version of things. I can only be as truthful as my memory allows, and often it is a feeling as much as a fact that comes back to me, and I wonder if memory belongs as much to imagination as to truth.

JG Ballard says, 'Memories have a huge staying power but like my dreams they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters like shipwrecks on the seabed.'

Diving down to the 'wreck,' as I do in writing memoir, I am occasionally finding that new treasures emerge. This week I recalled, not a new memory but a long forgotten one. It takes place in the dark, shadowy, house of my early years. My father is reading to me from a large volume, the title is embossed in gold, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the illustrations are black-and-white. I would have been four, five at the most. What did I make of it? I cannot say in any detail except that I know I was entranced, captivated by the notion that a girl could climb through a mirror into another world.

Thanks for reading

Avril x