Dodgy memories

Since I have such a bad memory, and since so many years have elapsed since the events in question, I've been wondering lately how many of my early memories are reliable. In other words, did they truly happen or has imagination taken over from reality?

• Was I almost crushed to death by a falling chimney?
• Did I almost drown at Southend on Sea?
• Was I almost killed by two speeding cars as I ran across a busy road?
• Was I really bullied for several years at boarding school (why can't I remember any of the details)?
• Did a schoolmate really commit suicide?
• Did I almost suffocate in my first workplace from all the tobacco smoke?
• Did one workmate really tell me she thought her breasts were too small?
• Did two of my workmates die of cancer?
• Did I really sleep with a couple of men?
• Did I really climb the Eiffel Tower as a teenager?

There's no way of confirming most of these supposed memories. In most cases there were no witnesses, or if there were they're now untraceable. Possibly my sister could confirm one or two of my memories - if she hasn't tweaked them herself.

But after all, most of these memories are 40 or 50 years old, which means plenty of time for them to be embellished or altered or simply invented.

At least I don't deliberately concoct dramatic memories to impress whoever I'm talking to. I don't claim to have met the King or swum the English Channel or climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. My memories, what's left them, are boringly humdrum.

And I didn't climb the Eiffel Tower. You can't climb right to the top for safety reasons. So that memory is definitely dubious.

Hard to imagine

I have a problem with novels that other people don't seem to have. I find it very hard to conjure up a vivid mental picture of the characters. Even if I read a description of someone several times, they remain words on the page and I get no clear image of them. I can summon up a stereotype of an old man or a young woman or a gurgling baby, but nothing more specific.

Most people seem to conjure up characters in their head quite easily. They have a very haunting image of the person, almost as vivid as someone in real life. They know exactly what Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby or Jane Eyre look like, while I have no such image.

If I have a vivid picture of someone, it's only because I've seen them in drawings or films - like Miss Marple, Frankenstein's Monster, Oliver Twist or Winnie the Pooh. I may know what they look like even if I haven't read the book - like Harry Potter.

It's frustrating because I feel I'm not really enjoying a book fully, I'm not totally immersed in it, if I can't picture the characters in my head. I can follow the plot and know what's going on, but there's something missing. It's like being in a very bare room with only a few sticks of furniture.

I guess I just have an inability to translate words into a visual image. They remain words and for some reason don't fire up my imagination as they should.

I'd love to see novels that have illustrations of all the main characters. I seem to remember that being a common practice when I was young (in Dickens for instance), but somewhere along the line they got dropped.

Culture vultures

Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt, has been vilified by political activists for writing about people and things that are outside her own personal experience. They say she's guilty of cultural appropriation.

The book is about a mother and daughter who flee Acapulco in Mexico for the US to escape a drugs syndicate. Her journalist husband had been writing articles about the cartel and they took their revenge by murdering the rest of the family.

But the critics point out that she's not black, not Mexican, not a migrant, and not involved with the drug trade, so she shouldn't have written the book. She should have left it to those with direct experience of the subject matter.

What that implies though is that nobody should write about anything other than their personal experience, and anything merely imagined or fantasised is off-limits. This would obliterate whole swathes of fiction and leave us only with autobiography (even biography would be impossible, as it's not written by the person concerned).

Authors like Lionel Shriver, Zadie Smith, Kamila Shamsie and Aminatta Forna have rushed to Jeanine Cummins' defence, saying that the whole point of fiction is to imagine things you haven't personally experienced, especially things that nobody has even thought about before.

If the critics are so concerned about the authenticity of American Dirt, why don't they write their own novels on the same theme instead of trying to demolish hers?

Yes, it's obviously cultural appropriation if you're blatantly ripping off someone else's culture for your own personal gain. But if all you're doing is imagining other people's experiences, where's the harm? You may even be drawing attention to scandalous situations that need to be remedied.

The keyboard warriors should find some more deserving targets.

PS: A scheduled author tour has been cancelled due to serious concerns about the author's safety.

Pic: Jeanine Cummins

Crazy dreams

My dreams are very different from other people's. Everyone else seems to dream about real events and real people, while my dreams are totally abstract - bizarre figments of my imagination.

I often dream about an awkward workplace situation, even though I haven't had a paid job for some 16 months. I'm sitting at an office desk with no idea what I'm meant to be doing. Or I'm in a works canteen where everyone is stuffing themselves but I don't know where the food is being served. Or I'm at work trying to read an important report in a language I don't recognise or understand.

Where does this stuff come from? I've never been in any of these situations so my brain seems to go on a solo run as soon as I fall asleep.

I never dream about actual workplaces I've been in, or the people I've worked with. I never dream about the genuinely embarrassing, awkward situations I've encountered.

I dream about Jenny very occasionally and once I dreamt about a Facebook friend, but that's about it. I don't dream about my family, my friends, my neighbours or people I've met during the day. My dreams are nothing but a kind of nocturnal spam.

I've never heard of any other adult whose dreams are so abstract, but surely they must exist? Or does everyone dream about Aunt Gillian upsetting the teapot when she paid a visit yesterday? Or does everyone dream about winning the lottery or meeting their favourite celebrity?

I think I need some urgent adjustments to my dreaming software. It's seriously defective and needs to be replaced by something more normal. I want to dream about Annie Lennox. Or Bonnie Raitt. Or even Aunt Gillian will do.

Crazy thoughts

Getting unwanted and peculiar thoughts is more usual than you might imagine. But most people don't like to admit to them because they don't want to appear crazy or irresponsible or dangerous.

It's very common to think about doing violence to other people - murdering them, attacking them, poisoning them, setting fire to them, or being sexually violent. Or you might be convinced you've run someone over, or unwittingly harmed them, or made them ill. Or you imagine your house is about to collapse, or you're dying of terminal cancer, or your car has a deadly fault.

Apparently the vast majority of parents have unwanted thoughts about harming their children (no doubt when little Rebecca is being especially arsey), but they wouldn't dare tell anyone else - unless the other person has confided first.

I have my fair share of bizarre thoughts I'd rather not share. After all, I want to be seen as sensible and responsible, not as some raving lunatic who wants to knife the next-door neighbour.

But when you bear in mind the sort of stresses and strains (and obstreperous people) we all have to cope with in our daily lives, it's hardly surprising our imaginations go a bit wild and start dreaming up outrageous solutions. How convenient it would be if that workmate who criticises everything you do suddenly vanished.

If you keep those odd thoughts to yourself and don't act on them, then it's no problem, it's just the normal workings of the human brain. What's alarming is those individuals who not only have odd thoughts but act on them and cause mayhem. Like the gunman who runs amok in a college, or the nurse who secretly poisons her elderly patients.

Goodness knows what that little old lady on the bus is quietly plotting....

Just imagine

What an advantage it must be to have a really fertile imagination, one that endlessly throws up new ideas without any conscious effort.

My imagination is very sluggish. It comes in random fits and starts. It can be bubbling away furiously for a while and then suddenly it stops dead and refuses to yield anything for hours on end.

This is why I couldn't be a full-time writer. I've tried to write a novel but got total writer's block after around 100 pages. Despite every attempt to get the flow going again, my imagination obstinately failed to cooperate.

Without a constantly freewheeling imagination, I'm often stuck firmly in the prosaic everyday reality, getting bored with the familiar routine but unable to transcend it, unable to drift into a parallel consciousness of tantalising images and scenarios.

I like to think that if I had a fizzing imagination, my life would taken all sorts of spectacular twists and turns that would have transformed it from a fairly predictable middle-class lifestyle to something much more extraordinary.

Not that I'm complaining about how my life has gone, far from it, but I'm sure the strength of our imagination can make a big difference to the richness and vitality of our lives.

Of course imagination has also been responsible for some of the worst horrors of human existence - nuclear bombs, Nazism, torture, slavery - but if we had no imagination at all, the world would be a grim and oppressive place indeed. Change would be impossible. We would be frozen in a permanent Stone Age.

Imagine that.