Lifelines - Emma-Louise Silva

For literary authors who revisit their experiences of youth to write autobiographical books, imaginatively drawing on memories plays a prominent role in the creative process. On the basis of cognitive literary studies and the archival study of creative writing processes, I have examined notes, mindmaps, manuscripts, and typescripts to chart how authors reconstruct their memories. The authors in the corpus, David Almond, Roald Dahl, and Jacqueline Woodson, writing in their fifties and sixties about childhood and teenhood, demonstrated a striking skill for remembering details across the lifespan. This raises questions as to their heightened capabilities for detail recall of what-where-when conjunctions. Studies have argued that whereas semantic memory (our collections of general knowledge and facts disconnected from the spatiotemporal context of learning) shows relatively little decline during the ageing process, episodic memory (our recollections of specific episodes linked to their spatiotemporal contexts) is affected by age-related deficiencies. Yet recollections of the spatiotemporal contexts of past experiences are essential for imaginative autobiographical storytelling, especially in the case of older authors writing about their youth. By drawing on these authors’ manifestations of literary craftmanship, this presentation aims to delve into detail recall across the lifespan by means of a neuroliterary lens, all while time travelling through the ontogeny of my own interdisciplinary trajectory.