Laments: Authority over Memory

This is a scrapped section of an essay on an Autobiography that I felt was pretty interesting, posting it here so that I know where to find it if it becomes useful again. FYI: The book is Sold for Silver by Janet Lim. Maybe I'll post it here if it turns out as an acceptable read.

-------------------------------

Who are we to judge whether a piece of writing is authentic or not? Who are we to judge whether the author is lying or not? Who are we to say whether the author is writing with specific intentions or not? And to that I answer, why not? 

When a piece of writing calls itself an autobiography, memoir, reflections, it becomes impossible (unless if one is a mind reader) for an outsider to grapple with the ‘truthfulness’ of the information conveyed – memory has a special kind of authority that is hard to topple because memory is personal and inaccessible without first being filtered through the mind of the person who holds those memories. Memory grants the autobiographer or memorist almost absolute power over the reader and it intimidates us into not judging – because we are unable to create an equally authentic alternative, due to the fact that we did not physically live in the world the author has reconstructed.

I will like to present two counterpoints to rethink that position. Firstly, memory is imperfect. Memory can be altered, fragmented or lost through traumatic experiences or simply due to aging. When one tries to reconstruct a coherent picture from incomplete memory of a lost time, he takes the fragments and clues left within the memory to piece out a complete picture that at least makes sense to him. Secondly, people can lie and more importantly not lying is not the same as telling the truth. As authentic an account may be, the author may choose to communicate to us only part of the memory and conceal other parts, again consciously or unconsciously – there is a high chance that the eventual portion of the memory being conveyed to us through the text is incomplete and far from a certain ‘truth’ that gives the person holding those memories the authority over outsiders in the first place.