You see it all the time - some celebrity writes autobiography/memoirs, and in it, they recall conversations verbatim from 30 years ago, or can tell you what they felt, saw, ate, did in army boot camp, or in NFL training camp, or while in high school, etc. Meanwhile I can’t tell you what I ate for lunch last Wednesday.
In some of these situations, maybe it is because the circumstances are out-of-the-ordinary (everyone remembers perhaps their 1st day in boot camp and 1st encounter with the drill sergeant, but not some other random day in the military,) but how else do they recall conversations word-for-word from decades ago? Are they making most of this stuff up or generously “filling in the gaps?”
I don’t doubt that a great deal of the material they offer is somewhere between an outright fabrication and some degree of non-malicious faulty memory. When the author wants to mention other people by name though, they will usually do some degree of fact checking with the named person. They’ll have multiple conversations along the line of “Say Bob, do you remember when that goat exploded in front of the Kinkos in May of '91?”* The author will do the research to substantiate any claims interesting enough to make it into the book.
It may be that people who tend to recall their own past as vivid scenes are far more likely to write autobiographies than those who don’t.
I’m always amazed when people indicate that they don’t remember much about 4th grade or 11th grade or their first girlfriend/boyfriend or whatever. (WTF, weren’t you there for it?) Maybe I spend more time thinking back and playing my own memories than lots of people do, or maybe if something makes the conversion from short term to long term memory in the first place, I don’t tend to forget much stuff that’s stored there.
Having said all that, no, I don’t recall every conversation word for word. By the time I’m writing about it, the words I attribute to Character X in the scene in the halls of D wing may indeed have been spoken more or less as attributed at some point by any of a batch of people who have been combined into one representative person, Character X, but not necessarily during the D wing incident, which itself is a pastiche of roughly four or five similar occurrences; but the scene as written is a faithful and accurate representation of the kind of thing that did happen and Character X and his behavior and personality represent a handful of interactions and personalities that formed a pattern.
If Character X were a known recognizable person and I wasn’t changing the names, etc, I’d be a whole lot more cautious to be precise. But even then, some of the words I might have coming from his mouth are only going to be a rough equivalent of what you’d hear if you had a recorded transcript. The more memorable phrases, sure, they’re spot-on. The term my boss used for the dark murky color that the auto body customer insisted on was “bugshit brown”. The opinion the college prez voiced about the acting dean of student affairs was definitely “can’t find his ass with both hands and won’t wipe it without permission”.
As author you fill in between the dots and you condense huge scads of semi-interesting often-boring and repetitious life events into a concentrated representative set of scenes, representative background characters, and typical conversations, and you tell the story of what actually happened in a way that has some hope of being entertaining.
I know that sometimes if I’m just thinking back on my own, I can only remember so much, but the process of discussing it with others brings back more detail, and so does discussing other events of about the same time period. What really brings it back is discussing those events with others who were there.
I imagine they remember how the conversation went, more or less, and probably remember any particularly colorful turns of phrase.
For example, I recall being yelled at by a football coach one time for having done something careless- I don’t remember exactly what I did, but I remember him saying “Damn it, you make me want to lay down and pee straight up!”
So from there, it would be easy enough to flesh out/embellish things to come up with actual dialogue that wasn’t too far off from what was actually said, even if video footage would prove it to be not quite accurate.
First, many use ghostwriters who are experts in putting these things together. Billy Graham used Jerry Jenkins(who later wrote those Left Behind books).
I saw an interview with Jerry Jenkins where he talked about how great it was to spend days, weeks, hour after hour talking to Billy Graham about his memories of various decades, years, and moments of his life.
Jenkins took huge notes and eventually was able to produce drafts that Graham went through and helped fix up.
Now, people that do these things on their own? They just have to roll back their minds to try to capture the moment again. I’ve written a number of personal narratives and I find if you practice, you get pretty good capturing the moment again. I’m sure my memory is not a perfect picture of things, but it is how I experienced them.
I somewhat recently found the latest, or at least a much more current edition of Hunter Davis’s “The Beatles”. This was an authorized biography. Davis gave me the impression he was in the room at Lennon’s home when he and McCartney wrote A Little Help From My Friends. That’s the background.
In this edition, in the foreword he explained things that were not in the 1st edition I had pored through years before. Every thing he wrote had to be approved of by John, George, Ringo and Paul. And Brian. And Mal and Neil. And George Martin. And Cynthia, Patti, and Maureen. I don’t think Linda and Yoko had entered the picture yet. And John’s Aunt Mimi and Brian’s mum Queenie Epstein. And they all had vetoes. So writing an authorized biography could be quite a challenge.
I think everyone is aware that unless it was previous recorded, anything said may not be 100% accurate. But no one would read autobiographies if “My mother said, ‘Get up, the house is on fire!’” was replaced by “My mother said something like ‘Get up, the house is one fire!’ but I can’t remember if that’s exactly what she said.”
I have been going through a phase of listening to true crime podcasts where cold cases are being investigated and I have this exact same reaction. People are interviewed about things that happened 20 or 30 years ago, and can remember incredible details about their day to day lives. I realize that these memories are usually around a big event in their lives, so they might have a few extra details, but its always astounding what they claim to remember with such certainty. If you asked me about last Wednesday i’d have to use a bunch of qualifiers like “probably” to describe my day.
Maybe that’s why i haven’t been interviewed for any podcasts yet…
I wouldn’t assume. Some people really do have much better memory than others. I worked with a guy for a quarter century who had remarkable recall for tiny technical details from many years past most others could not pull up if they had a gun to their head.
I am making some autobiographical notes. There are a few 60 year old memories that I recall like they happened yesterday. But most of my life is just a blur. So of course I stick to what I do recall. And of course it is possible that I feel I remember accurately, I don’t. But I still have some old notes that confirm some of these memories.
I had an experience recently of re-connecting with someone whom I last saw (briefly) in 1987 and with whom I spent a week in 1984. Naturally we compared memories of that week. For me these were still vivid memories and I would have sworn that all my memories were accurate, but I found that I was wrong about some of them, either because I had conflated him with someone else or because my memory had become fuzzy over time (or something else, I never did find out for sure). On the other hand, he mis-remembered one or two events for which I had actual evidence.
So if I were going to write about that encounter in my autobiography (no worries, mates, no chance of that) I would have had to pare it down to the events that either we both remembered the same, or for which I had independent evidence. Under these circumstances it would be a somewhat shorter story than I would have thought originally.
I know available documentation plays a big part, sometimes in odd ways. When I was a kid, Wal-Mart was selling a cheap VHS of some old-school professional wrestlers. Not high-profile matches (or squash matches, really) - just run of the mill matches featuring top stars against mediocre opposition. Years later, I picked up a copy of Lou Thesz’s autobiography. About 2/3 of the way through, he gave a hold-by-hold description of his match from the VHS. Again, this wasn’t anybody special, but Thesz had likely gotten a copy of the VHS (or some other compilation) and had that source material to draw on.
If you have some records or documentation of events, that can help trigger memories.
For instance, I am not a hoarder, but I happen to have saved every canceled check I ever wrote. Of course, I hardly write any checks nowadays, but back in the day that was a common way to pay for things, yah? So, on occasion when I look back over my old checks from 1979 or 1987 it will trigger very vivid memories of the circumstances and events related to the check. I imagine it would be the same for someone who keeps a diary or has old planners. One could look at the planner and see that on Tuesday, May 9, 1991, they met Carl for lunch and then had a dentist appointment at 2:00. This would bring back the memory that they were late for lunch because of car trouble and at lunch they ran into Mr. Gregg, the old coach from High School, and he was sad because his wife had just died recently…etc.
Old photos can be very useful for stimulating memories; not just of the specific event or thing ptotographed - a detail can spark a whole strand of reminiscing about something or someone.