How We Remember Others

In my work as a ghostwriter of memoirs, I am frequently impressed by the way healthy older people remember mostly the best about others. I think this is a conscious choice on their part—or the result of many, many tiny choices made through long lives. My clients, average age 80, seldom have bad things to say about others, especially those closest to them, and I have come to see this as the marker of a life well lived.

I thought of this personal experience in the past couple of days as I read two on-line reminiscences about my favorite contemporary novelist, the late and lamented David Foster Wallace (pictured above).

One of the two was the recollection of a big-shot, novelist Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections and Freedom). Franzen was a supposed “best buddy” of Wallace while the latter lived. His memories, given haltingly in an interview with a New Yorker editor, take potshots at Wallace. Thus proving to my satisfaction that Franzen is the opportunist I thought he was.

The other recollection is a lengthy essay by a nobody, a no-name student who took Wallace’s course in the literary essay during the last full semester of his life. (After taking himself off antidepressant medication he had used for over 20 years, Wallace hanged himself in September 2008.) The nobody is steeped in gratitude.

It tells me that it is better to be a nobody who remembers well than a big-shot who shoots his mouth. This is a lesson I personally need to hear over and over again.