White Gloves; How We Create Ourselves Through Memory

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Good. ix, [1], 276, [2] pages. Notes. Index. Cover has some wear and soiling. Limited underlining noted. This is a book about "autobiographical" memory, our link to generations past, indeed to our own past. Is this kind of memory accurate? How does it work? What does it mean? And what is the power of stories handed down from the past, like that of my grandfather's white gloves? A unique blend of personal narrative and scientific discovery, White Gloves reveals the centrality of autobiographical memory to consciousness and cognition. --Peter Salovey, Yale University. Written with exceptional clarity and insight (New York Times), and ranging widely over case studies, scientific knowledge about memory, and personal experience, as well as recent events and trial involving conflicting or repressed memories, Kotre's book gives us a fascinating and often moving account of the part which both real and false memories play in our lives --Anthony Storr. John Kotre was a professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Dearborn and a noted authority and author. Derived from a review in The Washington Post by Michael Dirda: As psychologist John Kotre tells us in this wide-ranging and often touching study, we unconsciously invest events of our past with symbolic resonance, highlighting key moments so that they illuminate our later adult personalities and anxieties. We are, ultimately, the kind of people our memories make us. Kotre calls his book White Gloves because he himself has charged this particular image with haunting personal significance. His immigrant grandfather irrevocably abandoned a musical career when he found he couldn't earn a living in America playing the clarinet: He never picked up the instrument again, never again wore the elegant gloves that were part of his band uniform. In his mid-forties Kotre discovered that the image of these gloves gave him the courage to leave a deadening marriage and start anew. To live, they taught him, sometimes required unwelcome sacrifice. Kotre's book about the nature and power of "autobiographical memories" should be of interest to nearly anyone, but especially to those of a retrospective nature. He discusses the most recent scientific thinking about how and what we remember, provides numerous case studies of the way memory creates our sense of self, writes agreeably, and grows appropriately mystical or spiritual at times. According to Kotre, "the scientific evidence . . . is quite clear: qualities like vividness and exactness cannot prove a memory to be true, nor can the lack of them rule out a memory as false." Moreover, "memories can be repressed" and "suggestion can implant phantom memories that look like they're repressed." Nothing about our mental past is permanent: We remember an event one way at 20 and completely differently at 40. Our memories are constantly being torn down, repaired, reconstructed. The remembered past is, after all, a creation of the present: If a woman discovers that her husband has been having a long-term affair, all her memories of their marriage will be immediately transformed. Memory, Kotre tells us, works a double shift, by turns an archivist, hoping to keep accurate records and a mythmaker, creating the kind of self-image or "positive illusion" that enables us to maintain mental health and confidence. He touches on the "Personal Fable" in young people, the belief that one's "experiences are of universal significance," and on the "Dream," a more realistic vision of what we hope to accomplish as adults, and finally on the "Life Review," which helps prepare us to accept old age and death. Whenever we do look back, "the years we remember best . . . say a lot about who we are and why our life is turning out the way it is." This last phrase displays Kotre's stylistic flair. He can write scientifically about the hippocampus as the locus for remembering and of how "scripts" help us to organize our mental pasts, but he may also murmur a bit of world-weary Gallic wisdom: "By the age of thirty most of us have had the experiences that count in our lives, and by the age of fifty we are beginning to see their long-range consequences." He periodically returns, with increasing emotional affect, to the example of his aging father, an Alzheimer's victim, who by losing his memory has inevitably lost much of himself. And, in his final chapter, Kotre focuses on how our existence and remembrances ultimately contribute to the larger pool of family or collective memory. As such, our lives, or aspects of them, can become exemples to inspire later generations, become what Kotre calls "ancestral help." ... unequivocally a good and rich book.