How We Remember Our Life Story

Emily Henry’s latest novel, Great Big Beautiful Life, which will be released on April 22, explores the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and how remembering the past can enrich our present or hold us back from enjoying the possibilities of today, keeping us entangled in our self-limiting beliefs.

In the novel, the infamous octogenarian Margaret Ives—heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the twentieth century—invites seasoned journalist, Alice Scott, to spend a month auditioning for the privilege to write her memoir. Alice upends her life and throws herself into the opportunity of a lifetime, even more so when she discovers that a highly respected biographer is also in the running for the position. As the story unfolds, Alice faces her own history and decides to rewrite her future by giving voice to the pain of the past.

While our lives are like a continuous stream of thoughts, feelings, and activities, we tend to remember distinct, meaningful events of the past, like chapters in a book (Clewett et al., 2019). Many of our day-to-day experiences are forgotten, but research shows that emotional arousal enhances the brain’s storage of memories, ensuring that we remember our most significant events, whether they embody emotional highs, like our wedding day or the first night in a new home, or emotional lows, like a natural disaster or loss of a loved one (McGaugh, 2013).

While recording Margaret’s memories for the sake of writing a biography is what Alice, dedicates herself to in Henry's novel, today most people record detailed information about their lives on a daily basis via social media, potentially changing the way we remember and recall our life’s stories. Digital resources act as an external memory of sorts, allowing us to search through our history to recall forgotten details of our past, like what gifts we received last Christmas.

Source: Penguin Random House/Used with permission

While these online modes of remembering can be helpful in recalling the past accurately, and an especially remarkable tool for those dealing with medical conditions that lead to memory loss, researchers have much work to do in exploring the potential drawbacks of publicly broadcasting the nuances of our daily lives online, and the ways that social media might alter the way we perceive the story of our lives.

Perhaps pausing the social media upload and, instead, picking up a pen to write down our memories in all their authenticity, capturing the many facets of their truth on the page, can best help us to sort out the events of our lives, the emotions attached to them, and the story we want to tell in the way we choose to live each day of this great big beautiful life.