Memory and Fiction

What is the difference between memory and fiction? What are the intersecting policies of their tenuous and subjective relationship? For example: You have a woman, a mother recalling her dead daughter. She sees her daughter playing on the beach, she is viewing this scene and relating to it as archived footage catalogued under the auspices of Memory: Once upon a time, my daughter played on the beach, and I watched. I witnessed her. Except … this never happened. The mother’s daughter died when she was three days old, she never had a chance to substantiate and affirm her life through the continuum of memories, memory-building … there was no projecting the self repeatedly into scenes, incidents, episodes, that one day would be recollected. The beach scene never happened, yet the mother, in her time-hunted eyes, was watching it happen, again … she was recalling vividly what for her was a bittersweet memory, with narrative attached—My daughter was so happy that day, playing with the sea, the waves. The mother is not experiencing her daughter and the beach as an invented story, an obliging fiction, she is re-membering, re-calling, not fabricating … this happened and is happening now, all at once. You have to wonder how much of what we’re remembering is what we want and need and are compelled to remember, how much of memory is fiction masquerading as factual imprints, or impressions based on phantoms, the publication of haze, the fever-dreams of want, the lingering spells of haunt. How many memories are sketched from outlines of what never happened?

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About John Biscello

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, writer, poet, performer, and playwright, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of four novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, and No Man’s Brooklyn; a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, two poetry collections, Arclight and Moonglow on Mercy Street; and a fable, The Jackdaw and the Doll, illustrated by Izumi Yokoyama. He also adapted classic fables, which were paired with the vintage illustrations of artist, Paul Bransom, for the collection: Once Upon a Time, Classic Fables Reimagined. His produced, full-length plays include: LOBSTERS ON ICE, ADAGIO FOR STRAYS, THE BEST MEDICINE, ZEITGEIST, U.S.A., and WEREWOLVES DON’T WALTZ.
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