Anne always prided herself on having an excellent memory. She’s the type of person who can rattle off details like friends’ birth dates and the names of past teachers. In fact, when she sat down with us to write her book, she knew exactly which stories she wanted to tell. She knew every nook & cranny of her life. She had lived it.

After Anne’s first Storyflect interview, she milled through old photos and keepsakes to integrate into her book. The top inch of her boxes appeared exactly as she had remembered. But as Anne dug deeper, she started uncovering a forgotten world. She unearthed a slew of artifacts that had sifted through the filter of her memory. Ticket stubs from dates with her husband, her kids’ school projects, old sketches she had scribbled over the years.

At the bottom of a tattered bin, Anne found a shoe box filled with handwritten letters. Squinting out the cursive hand, she realized that they tracked her correspondence with her mother throughout the early 1960s. Anne was in her early-30’s at the time, living in Los Angeles with her husband and three children. Her mother resided five hours up the coast in a sleepy beach town. Steep telephone costs meant that the only feasible way of communicating was letter-writing. Accordingly, Anne and her mother kept up a healthy correspondence of at least one letter per week. Most were over three pages of beautifully-shaped script.

Anne spent the next week in her garage, poring through each and every letter in the collection. The more she read, the more she remembered. Recounting her letters refreshed the image not only of her mother, but of herself. By the time she read the last letter, she realized that no matter how good her memory was, our memories are bound to be lost if we don’t take action to preserve them.

Anne’s story got us thinking about the ways we treat the records of our past. It doesn’t matter how sharp we are: every person’s memory has blind spots. But that doesn’t mean we’re destined to forget our lives. It just means that we need to take extra care to revisit our past through mindful reflection. At Storyflect, we believe that crafting memoirs is the antidote to a fuzzy memory.

At the end of the day, writing isn’t just about preservation…it’s about rediscovery.