Prompt 225. Cascades of Memory

Some thoughts & a prompt on unlocking them

Frida Kahlo, Árbol de la Esperanza (Tree of Hope), 1946.

Hi friend,

The first lesson of the new year for me was the eternal lesson: to stay nimble, to remain limber, to accept the unexpected. On New Year’s Day, lab reports from my trip to urgent care came back showing a blood infection, and my medical team told me to get to the hospital as soon as possible. So Jon and I grabbed a few clothes and jumped in the car and drove back to New York to Sloan Kettering, where I was immediately admitted.

We packed so fast that I didn’t grab anything from my creative toolkit—my paints or brushes or even my journal. There, at the very beginning of our New Year’s challenge, I found myself stuck in the hospital, unable to write or paint or tackle one of the prompts I was most looking forward to: building a Joseph Cornell box.

At least, not in the way I’d imagined. Instead I opened my phone, and I typed January 2022 into the search bar of my photo app. I began scrolling through the entire month, picking a few and shuttling them into an album. Then onto February, March, and so on, each time selecting photos that either felt like they embodied something essential or told a story I wanted to remember.

Given that 2022 proved to be the ultimate shit show for me, I didn’t expect it to be fun—but it was. Rather than just the low points, I uncovered moments of joy, big and small. I unearthed events and experiences that I’d forgotten, and memory began to beget memory. I recalled so many beautiful things. In a way, it allowed me to reimagine the narrative of this past year, which I assembled into a kind of photo essay. It also inspired me to create a new prompt for you today—as a way of writing a new, maybe better, truer, more useful story.

But before I go, I want to say that after a pretty un-fun start to the New Year, I have something bright on the horizon. To my surprise and great excitement, my medical team okayed me to travel to Mexico City with Jon this week—he’s going for work, and I’m going for Frida. I’ve only been to the city once before, back when I was a teenager, and her Blue House was closed, undergoing some kind of renovation. Frida Kahlo’s quest to make peace with a broken body, and more than that, to make beauty out of it, is more resonant for me than ever—ever more spiritually meaningful. This trip feels like a pilgrimage, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Sending love,

Suleika

Some Items of Note—

• I just shared my response to today’s prompt—I’m calling it “My Year of Love: A Photo Journal of 2022.” It’s a look back on what I thought was the worst year of my life but was in fact so much more.

• Congrats to everyone who took part in our New Year’s Journaling Challenge! It was so thrilling to see you being inspired by art, sharing what it brought up, making meaning of it together. If you missed it and want to give it a go this week, you can find it here!

• Today from 1-2 pm ET, we’re hosting a live journaling hour for paid subscribers. It’s a capstone for the challenge, but anyone is welcome. And if you can’t make it, don’t worry—we’ll record it and share via email. Click here to join!

At Ucross, writing scenes. 2017.

Prompt 225. Cascades of Memory by Suleika Jaouad

When I started writing my memoir Between Two Kingdoms, I gave myself a straightforward task: write twenty scenes. At least I thought it was straightforward. In fact, remembering enough detail to make a scene come alive is challenging, for any number of reasons—maybe because an event didn’t imprint very deeply, or you blocked it because it was painful. I struggled. Each day before I sat down to write, I would close my eyes and try to visualize a particular moment by running through all the senses. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes I came up blank. 

It reminds me of something the poet Craig Morgan Teicher once said in a workshop, as we were going around the room, each naming books we’d recently read and loved. He said trying to recall things on the spot can sometimes feel like you’re reaching into a goldfish pond—the fish scatter. Those efforts to dip into the well of memory often felt like that for me.

In the end, I relied on many different sources to cull details, reconstruct timelines, and recreate those scenes. I went back to old journals and emails and medical records, and I interviewed friends and family to tap their memories. But one of the richest and most generative sources was right there in my hand: my phone. We often think of our devices as great distractions, and that’s certainly been true for me. But my phone was also a powerful tool that helped me recover absent or patchy memories. And more than just the specifics of what I was wearing on a certain day or what the weather was like, it provided the whole outlay—the lead-up to the moment in question, as well as the aftermath.

Memory is such a curious thing. It’s famously fallible, as a journalism teacher of mine highlighted with a simple exercise. It was a class about war reporting, and on the first day, he placed a photograph on a projector. Then he turned it off and told us to describe it—and of course we all recalled it differently. Some said the figure in the photograph’s coat was blue; others vehemently insisted it was green. 

But even the slips and lapses can be fertile sites for exploration, as so many brilliant memoirists have shown us. I’m thinking of Tara Westover’s Educated, which begins, “My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it happened.” I’m thinking of my late mentor David Carr’s The Night of the Gun, which also hinges on a memory—one that charted the course of his life, one that he later learned he’d gotten completely wrong. I’m thinking of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, where the opening scene, drawn from her early childhood, is filled with such striking detail that it seems impossible she could’ve remembered it, but we as readers understand: this is what memory feels like, how it lives in us, moves us, shapes us.

And what I find most interesting about this trove of photos on my phone is that it can unlock cascades of memory, of days and details that I thought were buried. And that allows me to reflect on what I’ve remembered, and what I’ve forgotten—which is equally interesting—and to begin to tackle the question of why.

Your prompt for the week:

Scour old photographs—on your phone, in plastic-sleeved albums, in the shoebox beneath your bed—and select the ones that stand out to you as somehow emblematic, essential, surprising, the ones that tell a story. Assemble them into a photo essay, composing captions to provide context, to fill in gaps, to build a through line for your narrative.

If you’d like, you can post your response to the prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.

My Year of Love

I’ve been thinking of 2022 as the worst year of my life. But while in the hospital earlier this week, without much to do but scroll through my camera roll, I realized that’s objectively not true. As I scanned the months, I saw that a lot had happened: a lot of moving through hard things, yes, but also a lot of healing and a lot of truly surprising, wonderful things.

If you were to look at my photos before my relapse, a large portion was related to work—either trips I took, or photos of me all dressed up for a conference, or snapshots of a wall covered in butcher paper with big plans. But what’s here in my camera roll shows me that work was not my priority this year. My priorities were to stay alive and to heal and to spend as much time as I could with my loved ones. It was a year of sickness, but more than that, it was my year of love.