The Relationship of Emotion to Memory

Jill Robinson’s new memoir, “Past Forgetting,” is a brave, difficult, rambling, surprisingly intimate, surprisingly moving book. Its subject is not the legacy and further exploits of the oh-so-pretentiously named Hollywood royalty, which Robinson (the daughter of screenwriter and 1950s MGM head Dore Schary) chronicled in her notable earlier memoir, “Bed/Time/Story.” Instead, she turns her attention to a more urgent matter: the loss of her memory following a violent seizure, later diagnosed as a consequence of temporal lobe epilepsy.

Robinson boldly begins her book in the midst of her forgetting. She is in a hospital, in England, where she lives, and where she has been vacationing at a spa with “The Englishman”--her husband, Stuart, whose relationship to her she has forgotten. She was swimming when she had her seizure and fell into a coma. She awakened to a mind fogged over with opacities and elisions yet, at the same time, beacon-bright with pockets of her remembered past life.

It takes some time for the reader to surmise that Robinson is writing from the field, as it were, of forgetting. The repetitions and inconsistencies in her storytelling succeed in inviting the reader into the distressing, murky hallways through which Robinson has had to find her way these last few years.

The mysteries of memory remain vast. When, late in her story, Robinson goes to see neurochemist Steven Rose, he tells her that while much is known about the way the mind learns, the mechanisms for refinding lost memory are almost entirely unknown and uninvestigated. We remember, he explains, “to be able to survive in the world. To survive in the world is entirely about emotional rather than cognitive things.”

Robinson has intuitively arrived at a similar understanding. “Don’t tell me emotion doesn’t short-circuit memory,” she says, after observing that her blank spots are “always, always, always” around her children, whom she feels she has greatly disappointed in life. This is but one example of the painful candor with which Robinson seeks to repair the damaged mosaic of her memory.

In addition to her children and her current marriage, Robinson finds she has also forgotten recent friends and much about her last 10 years in England. Yet she remembers and knows deep in herself, that she is foremost a writer, and despite the discouraging prognosis of more than one doctor she visits, she is determined to write again.

Inevitably, given her background, Robinson touches on the habits and mores of old Hollywood, but she does so with fresh rigor and honesty. Robinson assesses the way she was raised and the way she raised her own children. She recognizes that, as a child, she was treated for, but never told she had, epilepsy, which used to be seen as “an unmanageable and unmentionable disease, like alcoholism.” She becomes increasingly thoughtful, even canny, about life, and, in the end, she achieves a small, hard-won emotional catharsis when she returns to America to reconnect to her children and grandchildren, recognizing that the latter are her “memory’s link to eternity.” They may be, but it certainly helps to leave some well-wrought pages to help solder the link closed.