I Remember: Readings and Responses
Brainard really does remember it all. Using hundreds of concise, targeted, nostalgic sentences, the intensely personal recollections propel an intimate reading forward with forceful velocity. It is not a book which is easy to press pause upon, nor is it comfortable to read in one sitting. Because of the relentless outpouring of memories, only briefly punctuated by lengthier anecdotes, all of which malleably twist time between objective history and subjectively recalled lived experience, the piece is challenging in removing any traditional sense of development or arc. It starts as it finishes, but the journey Brainard takes us on isn’t just his. It’s ours. In his writing we also see ourselves, and while Brainard ends by telling us he couldn’t pronounce ‘mirror’, it’s precisely this object which he is holding up to the reader. It’s as much what he’s remembered as it is what we’ve forgotten.
Chosen Passage:
I remember daydreams of living in a treehouse.
I remember daydreams of saving someone from drowning and being a hero.
I remember daydreams of going blind and how sorry everyone would feel for me.
I remember daydreams of being a girl and of the beautiful formals I would have.
I remember daydreams of leaving home and getting a job and an apartment of my own.
I remember daydreams of being discovered by a Hollywood agent who would send me to a very special place in California where they ‘re-do’ people. (Very expensive). They’d cap my teeth and make my hair look great and make me gain weight and give me muscles and I’d come out looking great. On my way to being a star. (But first I’d go home and shock everybody).
I remember daydreams of a doctor who (on the sly) was experimenting with a drug that would turn you into a real stud. All very “hush hush.” (As it was illegal). There was a slight change that something might go wrong, and that I’d end up with a really giant cock, but I was willing to take that chance.
It’s rare that Brainard couples together this many thoughts under a consistent qualification of what he remembers, but the series of daydreams (p.96-97) accelerate in a cumulative way both in style and substance. They start with innocent child-like dreams of treehouses and boyhood heroism, but swiftly turn to adult conceit, vanity, and ultimately gambling his own health on the daydreams promised by experimental drugs. As the daydreams become more fantastic, the style matches them in complexity and pace but in the finish collapses in the limbic discord between seen and unseen. The treehouse as a place to hide becomes transformed into the ‘hush hush’ hiding of black market medicine only via time spent being ‘re-done’ in California. Brainard frequently takes this approach with the qualifiers of what he remembers, starting with an object, but transforming it through recollection. It’s not just that he saves the person from drowning, it’s that he becomes a hero. It’s not just the dream of being a girl, it’s the beautiful formals he’d have. It echoes how memory itself wraps around lived experience. How we don’t just remember things, we remember what those things were combined with us.
As a technical choice, this qualification allows Brainard to not just recall something in the world, but to reconcile it and place it adjacent to his own emotional experience. It moves the writing from objective diary to intimate experience, and pulls us closer as readers. Brainard combines this technique with a disorienting sense of time and space, where we are never truly sure of where we are within his, or our, recollections. We often recognize the object of his remembrance, but are drawn closer when his emotional experience also matches our own. When he writes ‘I remember continuing my return address on envelopes to include ‘The Earth’ and ‘The Universe’ it isn’t that I recognize that as something I also used to do, it’s that I know exactly what that felt like to do. It’s the same thought as Alan Bennett wonderfully writes in his play The History Boys, “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” A technique where Brainard firmly grasps the reader’s hand, and drags us through not just his memories, but also our own.
