You Must Remember This

1. My memory is legendary in the family, and though it’s wearing thin now, getting patchy in places, I still remember when the legend began. It was the fall of 1959, when I was five, and we had just gotten home from a year of travel in Italy, with stays in Perugia, Florence, and Rome. My father was a scientist at Columbia back then, and the trip was his first sabbatical. He was finishing a book he was writing with his friend and colleague Bruno Boley, Theory of Thermal Stresses, which would become a bible for the kinds of engineers who designed NASA rockets, satellites, and heat shields. Now we were back in Hillsdale, New Jersey. One evening, my father brought out a brand-new Kodak slide projector and set it up on a footstool in the living room. I remember the room, can still hear the whir of the projector’s fan and smell again the hot, sourish smell from the projector bulb. I remember where my father stood (by the new projector), where my mother sat (in the armchair next to it), and where I sat or lay (on the rug). My little brother, Eric, was already asleep, I think. Slide. It was a scene from months before. In the picture I was crouched in the middle of a dusty path, under the hot sun, digging in the dirt with my bare hands. “That’s Monte Testaccio!” I said. “That was the first thing we did in Rome. There was a stone in the middle of the road, and I was trying to dig it out. You and Mom and Eric kept on walking,” I told my father. “Then you stopped and turned around and called me to catch up. You said we would find much better things up ahead.” Monte Testaccio was a lonesome, scruffy hill, the remains of an ancient Roman garbage dump. In those days there weren’t as many tourists in Rome, and we had the hill to ourselves. My father told us to wander around, and we went rambling as if we were picking up shells and pebbles at the beach. My brother and I found little bits of broken pots. Sitting there in our darkened living room, I could still see each one. “You found the best piece,” I said to my father.

I saw his find in my mind’s eye, and I can almost see it now, a brown, neatly turned terracotta jug handle. Slide. “That was also our first day in Rome!” I said. We had gone for a family walk down a broad avenue. I remembered the row of blinkered horses and carriages that stood and waited at the curb, and just beyond them, the crazy Roman traffic. “A man threw his cigarette into the street,” I said. “I ran into the street to put it out. You ran after me,” I told my father. “You got me back to the sidewalk. You shouted, ‘You don’t run out into the street!’ ” As I sat there on the living room rug, the whole scene was still right there before me. “I said, ‘There was a cigarette. I was afraid it would start a fire.’ You shouted, ‘That cigarette will go out by itself!’ ” “What a memory you have, Giannetto!” my father said. 2. I also remember writing my first line. It was that same year—1959—the first week of September, midafternoon. Again, I can bring back the whole scene: where I sat at the kitchen table, the precise angle of the light on the leaves of the maple trees outside the picture window, the awkwardness of driving the pencil, even the smell of the paper. (Mimeograph paper, which smelled like pineapples.) I’m not like Funes the Memorious, in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Funes could remember (in the translation of Anthony Kerrigan) “the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho.” I couldn’t tell you what I had for dinner, say, on the night of Tuesday, October 2, 1962. However, I am memorious enough that scenes from the past are always present, always ready to be summoned up. I time-travel all the time, voluntarily and involuntarily. I remember doing this even at the age of five or six.

In one memory, I’m lying in the driveway—for some reason—and looking up at the sky while remembering scene after scene from the year before, and I can still recall a few of the scenes that came to me as I lay there. While walking my dog in the park not long ago, listening to an interview with the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, I recognized a fellow traveler. The interviewer, Max Linsky, asked him about his relationship to memory. Sullivan replied, “As I come up on 50, I find myself wishing that my memory weren’t as good as it is, you know?” This was the gist of their conversation: ML: You want it to be worse? JJS: Sometimes I just feel like I don’t forget anything. And I’m constantly replaying everything. And you feel it start to swallow you, sometimes. ML: That’s freaky shit, man! JJS: Yeah. Yeah. ML: You just remember it all? JJS: I don’t want to overstate it. If my memory were that good, I’d probably be useful in some way for, like, NASA. But it’s just relentless, and it’s just so vivid all the time. I feel like my heat shield wore off or something. Well, yes, I thought. Of course. Exactly. 3. Psychologists have a term for a certain kind of relentless remembering: hyperthymesia. The syndrome was discovered and named two decades ago by a team of psychologists at the University of California, Irvine. One of them, James L. McGaugh, had received this slightly frantic letter: Dear Dr. McGaugh, As I sit here trying to figure out where to begin explaining why I am writing you. … I just hope somehow you can help me. I am thirty-four years old and since I was eleven I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my past. … Whenever I see a date flash on the television (or anywhere else for that matter) I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting. Some people call me the human calendar while others run out of the room in complete fear but the one reaction I get from everyone who eventually finds out about this “gift” is total amazement.

Then they start throwing dates at me to try to stump me. … I haven’t been stumped yet. Most have called it a gift but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!! In other words, the author of the letter, whose name was Jill Price, had no heat shield whatsoever. McGaugh and his colleagues gave Price a series of tests. In one, they asked her to write all the dates of Easter Sunday from 1980 onward. In just 10 minutes she wrote out the 24 dates almost perfectly (one date was off by two days). And Price is Jewish. “My memory has ruled my life,” she told the psychologists. And: “It’s like a running movie that never stops. It’s like a split screen. … Like we’re sitting here talking and I’m talking to you and in my head I’m thinking about something that happened to me in December 1982—December 17, 1982, it was a Friday.” Famous cases of remarkable memory had been documented in the scientific literature, but those involved mnemonists: professional and amateur memory athletes who train like marathoners to remember random numbers thousands of digits long. They are the kinds of people who compete in the annual World Memory Championship. The most celebrated mnemonist in history is Solomon Shereshevsky, who was the subject of a decades-long case study by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in Moscow. Shereshevsky was an extraordinary memorizer, but he didn’t have his whole life running through his head, with every day neatly time-stamped; according to Luria, he seemed to exist “as in a haze.” McGaugh and his colleagues published a study of Jill Price’s memory in the journal Neurocase in 2006. They wrote, “We know of no other reported case of someone who recalls personal memories over and over again, who is both the warden and the prisoner of her memories.” The paper received a lot of publicity, and the psychologists were swamped with emails from people who claimed that they were hyperthymestic, too. Today there are about 100 well-documented sufferers of the syndrome, which is now called “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM).

That same year, Brian Levine, a neuropsychologist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, encountered a case that was Jill Price’s mirror image. A woman named Susie McKinnon emailed him to say that she had no autobiographical memories whatsoever. This wasn’t dementia; McKinnon was just fine, thank you. She had lived a full life—she just couldn’t remember any of it. She and her husband loved to go on cruises. All around their house they had souvenirs from Aruba, Bermuda, Curaçao. But unlike Jill Price, who could have told you what day of the week she had left for Jamaica, and what the weather was like that day, and what she ate on the plane, McKinnon couldn’t remember a single thing about a single one of those cruises. Levine and his colleagues wrote a paper about McKinnon’s condition, which they called “severely deficient autobiographical memory” (SDAM). Their paper got a lot of play in the news, too, and Levine set up a website to handle the public response. More than 25,000 people have filled out a survey on the website, believing that they have SDAM. 4. On the morning of September 3, 2025, which was a Wednesday, very warm and sunny, I arrived at my brother’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, bearing bagels and cream cheese, to discuss our own relationships to memory. Eric and I have talked about this topic many times, maybe a bit obsessively, because we seem to be somewhere near the opposite ends of the spectrum. He is not memorious. He calls me The Memory Man. Our experience of looking at a snapshot of the two of us in a family album is completely different. I see it, and I’m there. Eric studies it with a sense of estrangement, distance, dissociation. He doesn’t remember being present when the picture was taken. He doesn’t even feel that the child in the snapshot is him. He worries about this sensation of absence the way you might poke around with your tongue after a visit to the dentist, touching the place where the anesthetic is still making you numb. A part of him is missing, and he wants it back.