What We Remember, What We Forget
by Siobhan Harvey

Siobhan Harvey’s memoir begins, tellingly, with a gap. When she was eighteen months old – according to her mother’s retelling – Harvey was left alone in her mother’s bedroom. Later, the mother found the toddler unconscious, an empty pill bottle in her hand. ‘It was your fault, as usual,’ the mother frames this story of the overdose, which could have ended in tragedy. The story marks a gap in more ways than one, because while the event and its cruel retelling are violent incisions in Harvey’s life, she herself cannot remember it. The memory ‘of that overdose lurks inside me,’ she writes, but ‘it’s so deeply buried – in my mind, in my heart – it refuses to resurface. But it is there; isn’t it?’

This opening sets the tone for a memoir which is less interested in factual reporting than in the fabric of memory itself: the ways in which it weaves together events and fiction, presence and erasure, self and other, dream and reality. The story of her overdose, in the absence of memory, startles with its creative potential: during the COVID lockdown – in itself a gap, an empty space – Harvey began to confabulate, ‘that is to say, creatively reimagine’ the buried memory. Harvey engages with dream-memories – ‘something kaleidoscopic, entangled and chimerical’ – and imagines a conversation between her mother and her doctor about postnatal depression; she turns the scene into something akin to a ghost story, where she, as a ‘spirit,’ floats through her childhood home and haunts her mother as ‘a young woman, pallid as a corpse.’ It is through these confabulations that she, for the first time, feels a ‘revelation’ and a chance to be united with her estranged mother: ‘I replace my inadequacy as a memory-keeper with my imagination and its inexact rendering of what might have been.’

Told in three parts – Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval, named after the processes of memory-making – as well as an essential Prologue and Epilogue, What We Remember, What We Forget traces the faultlines of trauma, disappointment, and rejection from Harvey’s childhood in the UK through her emigration to New Zealand to the present. Harvey, a lecturer of Creative Writing at AUT and former President of the New Zealand Society of Authors, is no stranger to creative séances: her last poetry collection Ghosts (2021) already conversed with similar hauntings – the break with her parents after her coming-out; her emigration and the search for home; the legacy of John Key’s state housing policies. Her earlier collection Cloudboy (2014) – an ode to her autistic son, his love of clouds and languages, and a first reckoning with the difficulties and cruelties he faced in school – also resurfaces in this memoir: in later chapters, Harvey revisits the years she ‘fought the system that had failed him and every bullied student in this country.’

What We Remember is deeply infused with Harvey’s elegant, dream-like, and mournful poetry where heightened emotion becomes an almost physical experience: silence is ‘heavy as a suitcase’; violent words are ‘night-terrors’ trapped in her father’s throat; the sky ‘arche[s] in darkness like a bruised heel’; and the past ‘festers’ like an infected wound that time alone cannot heal. They are frequently revisited, reassessed, and put into conversation with literature, history, philosophy, and psychology. As a result, the work is less autobiography and more a mosaic of fractured glimpses that catch the light as Harvey privately studies them. Names, dates, and places are not always provided or sometimes added like an afterthought, and chronology becomes malleable and porous. ‘Not only are my memories failing to line up chronologically,’ she writes about an attempt to order her teenage years during the Thatcher era,

but in breaching time, they’re rearranging it. So that, out of sync with the principles of general relativity, my memories make backwards and nonlinear time travel possible, as if they’re akin to a rotating black hole. […]

It’s as if, in its working embrace of competing constructs of time, truth, subjectiveness and character portrayal, my memory forms a conundrum of alternate realities, a jigsaw of broken things.

The experience feels less like witnessing a final version of a story, where every word and emotion have been decisively fixed in place, but observing the process of shifting and rearranging memories, constructing meaning and selfhood, and attempts at healing in action. The result is deeply intimate, vulnerable, and painful, at times almost overwhelmingly so. ‘That scar of my youth,’ Harvey writes. ‘Always visceral, each time I remember it’ – with an intensity she very much transfers onto the reader. At times, the scars almost seem too fresh, too deep, still, to be shared comfortably, such as when Harvey describes an encounter with her son’s former school bully, now a student in her creative writing classroom: her ‘nemesis’ who is seeking her ‘aggravation’ through his assessment of a text read in class.

In passages like these, the memoir shifts from séance to exorcism: forgetting – or, perhaps, letting go – is as integral to its inner workings as remembering. ‘Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is the necessary condition of our existence,’ reads the epigraph taken from Sholem Asch. Thus, What We Remember, What We Forget acts as one poetic part of a personal archival work that is forever ongoing – with the final paragraphs performing an optimistic sense of closure that it – as one part of a still growing and shifting body of work reckoning with growing and shifting memories – cannot provide:

More than a chorus of words, what’s held in my psyche is a puzzle of the past: people, like myself and others; reflections; snippets of commentary; odd and delightful encounters … all of it retained there as a sequence of alternative realities, instalments in the story of my existence, and all now waiting for the pale skin of paper and the blood of ink to reanimate them. Once I’ve documented them, I will revise, redact and recompose them. Retain what I deem significant; remove what I deem unnecessary, until the completed version of my work reflects what I’ve chosen to remember and what I’ve chosen to discard. […] Happily, I begin to yield my memoir to the page.