Memory and the Past

Through Giselle’s, Jackie’s, and Ellen’s relationships with the past, the novel explores the importance of memory in preserving personal experiences and historical eras.

From a young age, Giselle believes that it is her “responsibility to remember things, to be the repository of family memories” (12). She not only keeps daily sketches and journals of her and her family’s life as a child, but later goes on to create Memory Piece. This performance piece dictates that Giselle write down all of her memories as they come to her, “continuously, from eight a.m. to three p.m., seven days a week” for a year (45). Over the course of the project, Giselle feels as if “she could seal her memories into permanence if they existed for a moment outside her” (46). However, the project also dictates that she burns the memory journals at...