When 'hottie' is not enough

The seasons don't change gradually in Melbourne, they arrive overnight. We were having a mild autumn; now the chill and solemnity of winter is here even though it’s still April.

Yesterday there was rain. We’re supposed to welcome rain these days and I do. I’ve learned to like the slick shiny look of a wet street and the sloshing sound the tyres make when they hit a puddle. I’ve learned to welcome the sound of rain prongs tapping on the window even though my roof leaks somewhat and it sounds as if rain is coming through the roof and falling on the furniture.

Given climate change and the chaos of Melbourne weather there will still be throwbacks, warm mellow afternoons to be savoured with guilty pleasure. But this is more than a taste of what’s to come for the next few months.

Winter oppresses me. At first I love the change of season as I sleep better because the nights are longer. I compose hymns to my hottie (no, not my hot new lover but my faithful old hot water bottle) and I savour the gas heater.

But when I close my front door I feel more alone in winter, more cut off from the world. Old mistakes and failings bail me up and demand explanations.

There is choosing to live in the past and there are times when the past swamps you like a suffocating blanket. It puts out your fire; it makes you feel cold as ashes.

My limbs feel lonely. I need a sensual workout. At times like this I don't feel like a sufferer of anxiety or depression, just an anonymous magnet without an object, or an object that shuns the magnets that are other people.

So many times I have tested myself and waited for the pay-off. Trouble is I do not hang around for the payoff. I just keep testing myself in superficial ways and saying ‘yes, you’re improving’.

I fear that the structure of my life is set. I fear that I’ll be single forever, that nothing I do will change that fundamental fact. I hope I’m wrong. I hope this is a deluded idea.

Going to the park to walk my sister’s dog Jordan, as I do three times a week, is hard at the moment. I’m still going but I expect less from it. In some ways this is good; when you expect less you’re more in reality, more open to what is really going on for and around you rather than trying to subtly ‘improve on’ the world.

Perhaps one thing I’m learning about the park that is quite painful and difficult is that it’s okay to be needy.

It’s safe to love Jordan, to call him my little pal and to catalogue the subtle ways he has changed me. It’s still not safe to go to the park for a chat because I’m lonely. (I wanted to put ‘a bit’ in front of lonely, as if writing ‘I’m lonely’ was somehow disgraceful.) It’s still easier to see strangers on the oval with unfamiliar dogs rather than people I’ve met before.

I hope this blog post doesn’t sound too self-pitying (although I think it probably does). Writing this kind of thing sooner or later helps me in some way. Life feels bleak, not impossibly bleak, just bleak.

One good thing: two of my sisters rang me, on separate nights, asking for help with computer/internet problems. In both cases I was able to offer wise counsel and useful advice.

Does this mean I’m some sort of computer whizz and I just don’t know it? Or is it simply that my family are so technically incompetent that they make me look good (not meant nastily)?

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Plastic potential

I’ve recently finished reading a book that has made me think about my brain in an entirely new way.

The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge is an expose of the cutting edge of a new area of science – neuroplasticity.

Doidge is a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is fascinated by the idea of neuroplasticity, a paradigm that is revolutionising neuroscience, the study of the brain and nervous system.

This new paradigm has huge implications for mental illness, brain injuries, the ageing brain, learning disorders and brain events such as strokes.

The old paradigm for understanding the brain was called localisation, and sadly it prevailed for decades despite evidence proving the contrary.

Basically scientists believed that various mental and physical functions were controlled from particular parts of the brain and that the brain itself was ‘hard wired’ in its abilities. If a part of the brain was damaged, it was curtains for whatever functions that part had previously undertaken.

Scientists also thought that children had ‘plastic’ brains only during the crucial developmental years, and that the ability of an adult brain to change was very limited – apart from the fact that it declined! We were told that when you lost brain cells, that was it – they were never coming back.

Doidge calls this way of thinking ‘neurological nihilism’.

In fact, the brain is an instrument we are only just beginning to understand. If one part is damaged, another part can often take over all or some of its functions. Different parts of the brain do hold ‘maps’ of different functions. But the map areas will be taken over by other functions if they aren’t used. Doidge has a maxim he uses throughout the book to explain how it works: ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together’.

And our brains are truly plastic in that they are constantly being remodelled by everything we do. For example, brain maps for particular activities (playing a musical instrument for instance) become more and more complex as our skills develop.

The examples Doidge gives of the potential of the brain to renew itself are incredible. They promise new treatments for autism, serious balance disorders, learning disorders in children, even vision impairment and chronic pain.

Depression treatment based on plasticity
One of the fascinating areas for plasticity is the study of severe depression. Apparently, in some types of depression the prefrontal cortex isn’t working properly. A therapy called ‘repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation’ (rTMS) uses an electric current to generate a changing magnetic field that penetrates the neurons. This can make the neurons fire and, when done repeatedly, they keep firing.

There is a 70 per cent success rate in the use of this therapy for patients with treatment-resistant depression, and its side effects are fewer than those of depression medication.

A new OCD treatment
A new treatment for OCD that takes account of plasticity is significantly different from traditional treatments in that it isn’t focused on the content of the obsessive thought, but on the process that produces it.

When we make a mistake, a particular part of our brain lets us know. This leads to the ‘nagging feeling’ that we respond to by correcting the mistake. When the mistake is corrected, ideally the uncomfortable feeling goes away.

But in OCD sufferers, the part of the brain that tells us not to worry any more – the caudate nucleus – is, to use Doidge’s term, ‘sticky’. He likens it to an ‘automatic gearshift’ that doesn’t work properly.

Traditional treatments for OCD, in particular exposure therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), require the patient to focus on the content of the repetitive thoughts in a bid to reduce their power.

But this new treatment enables patients to use their imaginations and thoughts to shift the gear manually.

An extra benefit is that the treatment can also be used for people who are worriers and obsessive thinkers rather than OCD sufferers. And it’s surprisingly simple.

Basically there are two steps:

First the patient relabels the OCD attack. Here she focuses on the fact that her gearshift is stuck rather than the content of the compulsion. She keeps reminding herself that the OCD is the problem, not the fact that, for example, she’ll be attacked by germs if she doesn’t wash her hands again. She also reminds herself that her mental gearshift is stuck.

The next step is to carry out a pleasurable activity, for up to 30 minutes, right at the moment the attack starts.

According to Doidge, when patients work on this therapy, they are literally altering their caudate, and strengthening their ‘manual transmission’. Of course, this therapy takes time – the anxiety about not carrying out the compulsion will still be there, at least at first.

Combatting the ageing brain
Scientists working in the area of neuroplasticity have devised ways to tackle the causes of cognitive decline and not just the symptoms.

The nucleus basalis is the part of the brain that sets off the critical learning period in children. It is always on during the critical period – hence the incredible ability of the young to learn.

But adults use their nucleus basalis only when they are really engaged with something and giving it their full attention. That’s what helps us to learn well.

Trouble with memory is due to an atrophying of the nucleus basalis. Anything that requires focused attention improves its functioning.

Learning new skills is a great way of improving the nucleus basilis because it thrives on novelty and being engaged. It’s important to choose an activity that you’re really drawn to so that you will be deeply engaged. A particularly useful thing to do is to learn a new language.

Other traditional practices that improve brain plasticity in a more general sense include learning a musical instrument, meditation, the Feldenkrais method, tai chi and exercise. (Doidge is particularly enthusiastic about tai chi.)

Neuroplastician Michael Merzenich, along with a team of scientists, has devised exercises to improve adult memory based on the principles outlined above. His company, Posit Science, has developed exercises for adults that help people to process sound better – the first step to strengthening memory – because they stimulate the nucleus basalis.

Better rehabilitation for strokes
Neuroplasticians have proved that people who have suffered devastating strokes can regain many functions, even if the parts of the brain involved in movement are irrevocably damaged.

Edward Taub has pioneered Constraint Induced Movement Therapy, based on neuroplasticity. It’s far more intensive than conventional rehabilitation, features constant repetitions of very basic movements that are designed to be incrementally more challenging, and forces patients to use the damaged parts of the body, rather than letting the undamaged parts take over – the principle of ‘use it or lose it’.

Doidge also tells the story of a stroke victim in his late sixties who after conventional rehabilitation was unable to move. His medical student son took him back to the basics, literally teaching him to crawl again, then walk, and so on. A year later he was functioning and seven years later he was mountain climbing.

Implications for positive thinking
There were so many questions that this book raised for me – many more than it answered. As one of the first attempts to popularise this emerging science in book form, it’s as much a signpost to future possibilities as a description of current treatments.

The following text appears on some editions of the front cover of the book: ‘The power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility’. This is very misleading: the book isn’t in the main about positive thinking. But if the book’s findings have implications for positive thinking – and they seem to – this raises many questions in itself.

Positive thinking holds dangers for an obsessive like me. I tried it for years and it would get my brain into a bit of a state. I think this is because it’s a basic denial of the current reality.

For example, I might say to myself ‘I now have a wonderful new job that recognises my skills, with fantastic pay and flexible hours.’ But the fact is I don’t. So my brain is confused and strained because I’m asking it to believe something that isn’t true. At least one new age practitioner has also denounced positive thinking.

Although Doidge’s book doesn’t delve into positive thinking, it gives convincing examples of studies showing that imagining you’re practising a skill can have similar benefits for improving that skill as actually practising it. So it seems some versions of visualising at least may be useful.

Implications for mindfulness
Perhaps the thing that bothers me most about this kind of finding is its implications for mindfulness.

This is a practice increasingly used to combat, among other things, anxiety and depression and it’s derived from ancient Buddhist teachings.

The theory is that, at least initially, you don’t actually try to change your thoughts and feelings. You simply observe them in a detached, non-judgemental, attentive way.

Mindfulness seems to focus on developing the observer part of the brain to help the sufferer understand that the thoughts and feelings are not real, but just the natural fluctuations of the mind. In this sense it's supposed to improve attentiveness because it gently forces the brain to focus on the present moment -- surely a similar aim to that of the exercises, discussed above, that improve adult memory?

It’s also very concerned with minimising the kind of self-analysis that tends to make things worse.

I practise mindfulness in a very lazy way and I feel it’s helped me move a little bit more into reality. It hasn’t cured me by any means, and sometimes it falls by the wayside because my brain just becomes too busy to attend to itself.

But Doidge’s theory seems to suggest that we have to work at making our brains stronger, that we need to focus our thoughts and always use them actively in order to change. This in some ways seems to contradict the theory behind mindfulness.

Again, I hope that in a future book he deals with this issue in relation to two questions: Is mindfulness useful and if so, what is it about the plastic brain that makes it so?

Are there other, more effective treatments for anxiety that relate to plasticity?

Perhaps there are ways that the brain’s plasticity can be deployed to give people a more positive outlook without the brain actually having to lie to itself!

General questions
The material on the ageing brain really interested me and made me think about my own brain, which is subject to allergy-induced brain fog, the effects of insomnia and the clouds of anxiety. Could I improve my poor memory just by, say, learning a language?

The last time I tried to learn French I was shown to be a very mediocre student whereas in earlier years I’d been quite quick so I got discouraged. But Doidge says two interesting things.

He states that it takes six months for a new skill to really lodge in the brain (I didn’t give the French six months). But he also suggests that learning a language will improve the brain anyway – the implication is that the learning process rather than any proficiency gained is the important thing, but this isn’t explored very thoroughly. (If this were the case it would greatly improve my motivation.)

And what about my seemingly futile keyboard thumpings, which I gave up because without tuition I wasn’t improving? Were they worthwhile for their own sake, in helping me be a better editor, for instance?

The website publicising the book doesn’t allow for direct questions to Doidge – it appears there were so many queries that he was no longer able to answer them. The book is now available in over 70 countries and has set off a wellspring of interest from people with conditions that could benefit from plasticity-based treatments.

A documentary of the same name has been made. Doidge is still researching neuroplasticity, so let’s hope a sequel is in the offing.

Doidge will be in Australia next month, to speak at the Sydney Writers Festival on 18 May.

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Fulminating about executive salaries

I’ve been building up to writing a post on this and I’m about to boil over.

The topic of ‘executive renumeration’ is big in Australia right now. The Productivity Commission is looking into it. The Australian Government has acted in a very limited way, due to widespread community outrage, to curb salaries by making shareholder approval mandatory for termination payments that exceed a year’s base salary (big deal: they’ll just up the salary, but at least a salary is fully taxable). A discussion television program called Insight recently ran a program on the topic.

The evil prince Sol Trujillo has recently announced his coming departure on 30 June from the partially privatised Telstra, Australia’s paramount Telco. His salary package last year allowed for a maximum $13.4 million depending on performance, despite the fact that he alienated just about everybody, including the government. (Please explain to me why this is not outright theft.)

Since joining the company in 2005 he’s managed to sack 10 000 people, according to a February article in The Australian newspaper. The share price is currently lower than it was when the first lot of shares were floated in 1997. Jokes about Telstra service, if that’s not an oxymoron, are comedy staples.

The Productivity Commission is going to look at the regulatory framework that governs payment of executives and directors in Australia. It will look at some of the myths and truisms surrounding executive pay, such as: is it really tied to performance? Does upping salaries actually improve performance? Are the board members who make decisions acting on behalf of shareholders as they’re supposed to do or are they acting on behalf of executives?

I’ve been amazed at the narrowness of the media discussion of this issue. The Insight program features a journalist/host asking questions of an audience largely made up of people with an interest or expertise in the topic under discussion.

On the recent program that dealt with this topic, several of these audience members were shareholders. Some of them expressed the view that they were only angry because the ridiculous amounts being paid weren’t tied to performance. If the executives were doing their job, they wouldn’t mind the outrageous sums.

I’m going to be a contrarian on this issue and say: no-one pulling a salary is worth more than, say, $500 000 a year, no matter what they do. Sure, the job should pay enough so that lifestyle-wise these people can feel that they are above the herd (as well as being compensated for the hours involved and the responsibility). But beyond a salary that achieves that, perhaps they might actually perform better if they were paid less.

Look at a school principal. Their job is incredibly complex. They get paid an amount that recognises the sacrifices they make in terms of time and stress. And what value are they producing? The citizens of tomorrow, who will invent, create, toil, pay taxes, make the next generation, etc etc. Isn’t that worth more than anything a corporation produces? Yet school principals are paid a fraction of what the average CEO takes home. But we don't see them going on strike until their wages match those of the private sector mavericks.

Now here’s the thing. What if school principals behaved like spoilt brats, crossed their arms and said: ‘I wont get out of bed unless you pay me 3 million.’ The community would be shocked. Newspapers would be chock-full of letters condemning the avarice of these people and the poor example they were setting their students.

So rather than admiring the anti-social solipsists of big business for their ego-bound deludedness, we might actually question whether they are emotionally fit to lead an organisation. Isn’t greed one of the seven deadly sins? Doesn’t a belief that it’s worth sacrificing, say, 100 jobs so you can be paid obscenely indicate a dangerous egomania? And if these people are only in it for the money, will they really have the interests of the company and its shareholders at heart? What sort of school board would employ a principal who was obviously greedy and grasping?

Yet CEOs are admired for their selfishness, their childish petulance, and yes, their greed. Shareholders teach their own children not to be greedy, but tell these dingbats that they’re worth millions a year.

Of course, part of the problem is the way corporations are set up in the first place. Their first duty is to their shareholders and making a profit, rather than to the community as a whole. This has led to a culture whereby shareholders of traditional companies (not ethical investors) outsource their rapacious behaviour and even, in some cases, contempt for the environment, implicitly telling the company to do their dirty work for them. If you're going to do that, you want someone a little bit tough and ruthless.

The ironic thing is, whenever you interview someone in a powerful position making lots of money they always say they’re not doing it for the cash but because they love the job. If they’re not committed to the job for its own sake, they shouldn’t be there.

I don’t mind if someone identifies a gap in the market, starts a company and makes a squillion. They’ve taken financial risks and they deserve to reap the benefits, within the bounds of the law.

Business journalists have been part of the problem, particularly while the boom was still on. They’re just too embedded in the whole mad culture to make objective analyses. One journalist had the temerity to justify these amounts with the statement that top execs were vulnerable to losing their jobs at any time.

But CEOs are salaried. They’re not gambling on their own money like genuine entrepeneurs. The career risks they run in being judged on performance are no different in kind than those that everyone on a contract, so common these days in the professional world, is subject to, not to mention those in casual jobs who face financial obliteration on a daily basis. Why should they alone be compensated for job insecurity, compared with a market research telephone interviewer who is paid $19 an hour if they’re lucky, and for whom every shift could be their last?

That the people who make the crucial financial decisions in the plush boardrooms of the corporate world are in a little world of their own is indisputable. The recent Insight program included a member of the Telstra board, a board that, in the midst of a recession and following job cuts, had recently voted for base pay increases for executives. Amazingly, he justified this by stating that it was more stressful running a company in difficult times.

Does it never occur to these people that the company might actually do better if it used some of the obscene amounts it pays the top brass to create more positions for employees who actually do the work that counts, such as, in the case of Telstra, technicians, researchers and IT experts?

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My life as a blogger

It’s about four months since I started blogging and though this is hardly a long time I have been thinking lately about the effect it has had on my life.

I’m hardly Robinson Crusoe in turning to blogging. An article about blogging in the Age newspaper, written two years ago but still worth reading, estimated that 1000 new blogs are created every day. More recently it’s been estimated that a new blog starts every second.

I remember reading more recently about a survey which found that blogging improves your mental health and reduces depression. That’s not why I started blogging. It was because I had something to say but had failed as a short story writer and as a freelance writer for local broadsheets. I wanted an audience. But I also just wanted to get my constant political gripes out of my system. Modern life makes me angry. I wanted a forum to express my anger, goddam it!

And I wanted to stop pretending, as a writer, that I was completely sane. I’m not, but at the same time I’m not completely un-sane (I don’t like the word ‘insane’).

There are things I have discovered about blogging that I don’t like. It would be wrong to romanticise it. Despite the stories you hear about canny wunderkind who seek fame by crashing celebrity parties and then blogging about it (Julia Allison springs to mind) there are things I’m too scared to talk about.

This is due to low-level paranoia as much as anything else. For instance, I have written a couple of entries about my regular walks to the park with my sister’s dog Jordan. But I have had a couple of crushes at the park and I’m simply too paranoid to go into them.

But because my blog is anonymous there are things I can talk about – namely, my family. I can’t tell you how it has helped me to – well not just bitch about them, but try and put their peculiarities into words. I think in these instances the often silent blogosphere has acted like a wise therapist who simply nods sagely and looks understanding. My family are weird, no doubt about it. And getting that into the ether in black and white has been incredibly liberating.

What I love most about blogging is the looseness of the form. A blog entry can be a sentence, a poem, an essay, an article, a diary entry. And there is no compulsion (except in my case, self-induced) and no deadline. If I stop blogging tomorrow it won’t matter. No-one will stop paying me. No-one will email me and demand copy. This is a form that cuts a huge amount of slack. It’s perfect for someone like me who is blocked as a writer.

Although it wasn’t my primary aim I think blogging has helped my mental health. When I’m not working (which has been too much of the time this year) it gives me purpose. It keeps my brain going. It forces me to order my chaotic thoughts. It makes me aware of my shortcomings but somehow more tolerant of them. And it makes me feel heard, even if the most enthusiastic visitor to my blog is – yours truly (did I mention I was narcissistic?)

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You must remember this

Relying on other people’s memories is the worst thing you can do if you’re writing a memoir. But are your own memories any more reliable?

The memoir is the book genre du jour. There are sad memoirs of abuse and folly beyond comprehension, happy memoirs of carefree days spent in earthly paradises, and everything in between. It sounds legitimate, even clever to say you are writing a memoir: ‘I am working on a memoir of my invention of the non-veering shopping trolley.’ ‘I’m penning a memoir of the six months I spent on a remote Caribbean island with a group of transgender nasal-oto-throat hummers.’ ‘I’ve got a contract to deliver a memoir of the solo journey I took in a rowboat to the South Pole with only a packet of toothpicks and a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream.’ ‘I am writing a tell-all memoir of the eight hours I spent as nanny in the dying days of the Shane and Simone Warne household.’ Abelard, the famous medieval lover of Heloise, called his short memoir, without a trace of post-modern irony, Historia Calamitatum Mearum (‘the story of my misfortunes’).

But writing one’s memoirs in the plural is a different story (pardon the pun). It conjures up images of a mono-bosomed Edwardian dowager with grey curls and pince-nez, scribbling furiously about the indignant correspondence she carried on with the Lord High Chancellor during the searing summer of 1876, or a stack of inch-thick notebooks produced by a boy of humble birth who conveniently joined Her Majesty’s army as a private in 1946 and after fifty years of dedicated service had risen to the rank of Chief of the General Staff (easily five volumes, and an editor’s nightmare).

More modern versions might include a post-retirement teacher penning her account of an entire professional life wielding chalk and dodging missiles in the country’s most blighted school in its most disadvantaged suburb or, better still, an embittered ex-Telstra employee spilling the beans about decades of ‘restructuring’.

Partial amnesia
But what is the nature of memory, the word suggested by ‘memoir’? In questioning (interrogating?) my family for my own memoir of my early and university years in Melbourne, I have found not just that memories of the same event differ sharply, but that we all seem to have different recollections, as if we’re all suffering from partial amnesia.

As soon as I started querying my family around the dinner table after Friday night fish and chips, my sister volunteered that there had been a mirror in the bedroom I shared with her, a long mirror without a frame that stood propped up against the bedroom wall. She said that one day, when we both in bed sick, we set up the mirror to lie horizontally between our two beds so that we could play cards and Trouble, our favourite board game.

‘And while we were playing, the mirror broke’, she said. ‘I can remember it dropping to the floor and smashing. And mum was furious.’

The curious thing is, this doesn’t quicken my own memory, doesn’t cause an instantaneous ‘oh yeah, that’s right!’ Instead, one of the Loch Ness monsters of memory merely stirs in its vast lake and the water ripples slightly. A memory of a memory bubbles up, nothing more. But when I try to question her about the weird-looking mobile that hung in the centre of the bedroom at the time (‘Surely you remember? It had bright green cardboard fishes!’) she looks at me blankly.

Same event, different memories
Other times the memories do coincide but they differ in ways that show our contrasting means of viewing and dealing with the world. When I was about ten my family took its annual holiday to Torquay. As usual, our teacher father, who hated the beach, stayed home to do odd jobs, union work, and no doubt enjoy the peace and quiet. I returned from the holiday to find that he had wallpapered our bedroom with what the tactful would describe as an unfortunate design, all curlicues and swirling posies in lilac and aqua.

What I remember of this incident is meeting my father at my grandmother’s before we got home. He took a sample of the wallpaper out of a plastic bag and cheerfully told my sister and me about his handiwork. I stared at the sample in disbelief. I had been planning to go with him to the store to choose the wallpaper and had pictured some groovy 1970s geometric design that would be the envy of my friends. I could not believe he had actually gone ahead and done it.

But what my more practical, forgiving sister remembers is getting home and noticing that one of the rolls had been applied upside down. ‘The wallpaper was an improvement’, she insists, ‘although it didn’t really go with the bedspreads, which were white and had a green-and-blue rooster design’.

The perils of plundering
And is ‘memoir’ even the right word to use when we want to plunder other people’s memories to embroider our own? Almost as soon as I began writing my memoir I realised that its evocations of the past would be ten times more vivid if I chased up old friends and acquaintances and queried them for their reminiscences.

But my central dilemma was this: in my work to date I had described them in all their childhood and adolescent glory with brutal honesty. One of them was ‘lumpy’, one had ‘steady, ruthless eyes’, another was passionate and engaged but also bitter and misanthropic, and yet another suffered from adenoids (I had not spared myself; I am easily the most obnoxious, badly dressed character in the book).

Relying on friends to fill in the gaps in my memory would compromise my independence, forcing me to describe them more politely, and I would therefore not do it. Unlike family they might not be forgiving if they did not like their ‘portraits’. In fact, just imagining their reactions to my descriptions of them if I had subjected them to a barrage of questions spoilt all my fantasies of the congratulatory reception the memoir would get if it were published: ‘Look what that so-and-so has written about me after all the help I gave her – how could she!’ (Book is then hurled across room.)

I did make one exception to this rule. While I am writing I find an excuse to google some name or minor fact every fifteen minutes or so. It is usually a complete waste of time but gives me a much-needed break from the emotional spade-work. On one of these digressions I googled an old university pal, Anna, and found a description of her work role, including contact details, on the website of her workplace. The entry even included a photo. I felt like an utter snoop.

I sent off a humble email explaining that I was writing a memoir that was partly about university life in the 1980s and would love to catch up and have a chat about the past. The reply came back swiftly: yes, she would be happy to see me – and would I like to go to her place for dinner?

The amazing thing was that Anna, who had been living in Tasmania for almost two decades, had recently returned to Melbourne, and she and her husband had bought a house in the next suburb to mine. I raced around there. She was just the same, as the cliché goes, only having magically acquired a brainy husband and two sweet, giggly boys.

Anna was originally from rural Victoria so moved out into a share household long before I did. In my second year of university I often stayed with her in the inner city terrace she shared, and her eccentric, slightly older housemates were my first taste of the bohemian Carlton of the early 1980s.

But when it came to memories, things got difficult. Did she remember Rick, who had three lovers and took us to see obscure films at the Valhalla? What about sweet, pretty Jackie, with her endearing lisp, and the thespian Adam? And who could forget the hardy Emma, who taught us to cook curry with spices other than Keen’s?

To Anna it was all a blur. She could hardly recall their names, let alone who they were or what they did. Quite properly they were the backdrop of her life, not its main focus. I would have to settle for my own memories of these people, and although my brain had dipped their faces and personalities in the mental version of formaldehyde it had let other vital details rot.

A work of reconstruction
The word ‘memoir’ is misleading for other reasons. Sure, not everyone wants to write like Augusten Burroughs, the former advertising whiz-kid whose memoir Running with Scissors was a runaway bestseller. (Burroughs’s writing evokes a neon-bright hyper-reality, and indeed his family accused him of fabricating events in the memoir.) But even the most truth-telling memoir is hardly pure memory: it’s a painstaking work of reconstruction, of re-making the world.

Take dialogue for instance. Who remembers most of what they actually said twenty years ago, except in moments of huge emotional impact? (Perhaps some people do but I’m not one of them.) Instead, most of the time I have had to imagine the words I exchanged with others. In doing so, I slowly and painstakingly re-create a vanished period. I make my story tell-able, I translate it, I render all its faint notes and echoes audible. And I hope that my subconscious is somehow guiding me, that the recording angel stands behind me, vetting every word.

This process raises tantalising questions about the past. What words did we use in those lost pockets of time? And what exactly did we talk about during the many mundane moments, waiting for trams or watching the swimming carnival or sitting in the lecture theatre just before the first-ever Criminal Law lecture?

Fragments of remembered sayings between my school friends and me that were repeated so many times they are part of my mental scrapbook have therefore become incredibly precious. In Form Six, I recall, every book and film was ‘pithy and poignant’. I was said to be a ‘pseudo-intellectual’ who thought ‘it was all a farce’. My best friend Bernadette was ‘a caged lion’ and, one of our friends being Greek, we all derived juvenile enjoyment from singing the folksong ‘Maria me ta kitrina’ with mind-numbing repetitiveness.

These days, writing a memoir doesn’t necessarily leave you scrabbling for your next project. Assuming your first memoir is successful, you simply write another one. The US writer Kathryn Harrison followed The Kiss with Seeking Rapture and The Mother Knot. No sooner had Augusten Burroughs finished Running with Scissors then he was trying to cope with being Dry and preparing to confront A Wolf at the Table (ie his father).

Craig Sherborne followed his stunning, novel-like Hoi Polloi with Muck (not literally of course). Perhaps, then, the modern meaning of ‘memoirs’ has changed – no longer does the plural refer to a long, sprawling account of a complicated, usually privileged life; instead, one’s memoirs are a succession of pithy and poignant page-turners, hopefully all bestsellers.

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