The Unraveling of an Emotional Boy - Doseone
“A family, and a human being inside a family, put together a picture of their past in voluntary and involuntary ways, carefully constructed, arbitrarily dictated. A mother remembers one particular summer gathering on a lawn, with iced lemonade in a jug, and everyone smiling - as she puts in the album the one photograph where everyone is smiling, and keeps the scowling faces of the unsuccessful snapshots hidden in a box. A child remembers one scramble over the Downs, or zigzag trot through the woods, out of many, many forgotten ones, and shapes his identity around it. ‘I remember when I saw the yaffle.’ And the memory changes when he is twelve, and fourteen, and twenty, and forty, and eighty, and perhaps never at any of those points represented precisely anything that really happened. Odd things persist for inexplicable reasons. A pair of shoes that never quite fitted. A party dress in which a girl always felt awkward, though the photographs are pretty enough. One violent quarrel of many arising from the unjust division of a cake, or the desperately disappointing decision not to go to the seaside. There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers. A red leather belt. A dark pantry full of obscene and lovely jars.”
- The Children’s Book, by A.S. Byatt