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I was in my mid-30s when the woman who created me started to ghost me. My emails went unacknowledged; my calls were often unanswered or unreturned. When I did get through, she’d sound distracted and bored, as if my life no longer held interest for her.
At times, it felt like she resented my merest presence. I remember a particularly difficult conversation in January 2024. I had called to see how she was, and she responded to every single question with either awkward silence or a monosyllable. My breathing became panicked and shallow as I tried to find new ways of breaking through her stonewalling, but she rejected every attempt. When I put down the phone, I knew that something was irretrievably broken. Today, we are completely estranged, and I can see no way of repairing the relationship.
I may never fully understand why my mother would begin to treat me so disdainfully – a lack of resolution that has only added to the pain of the rift. What I really hadn’t expected, though, was the effect that this schism would have on my memory. As my communication with my mother became increasingly fractured, so did my recollections of my childhood and adolescence. I struggled to remember the details of events like birthdays and family holidays. They seemed faded, out of focus, and alien to me – as if I’d taken a glimpse at someone else’s photo album. Whole swathes of my past seemed to be slipping away from me.
I wanted to understand why that might be, and began to form a hypothesis based on narrative identity theory. From the moment we begin to speak, this theory suggests, we start to construct a kind of bildungsroman within our heads, charting the formation of the self with all the strengths and flaws, fears and dreams that come to define us. We are a living, breathing story that is constantly being updated, a process that inevitably involves some artistic licence as we select the facts that make the best tale.
We learn those scriptwriting skills from our caregivers, who appear not only as principal characters but also as co-authors of our narrative identity. They lend us a backstory and suggest the motifs that will later come to define us; the cadences of their voice, whether critical or compassionate, hope-filled or pessimistic, bleed into our own.
The breakdown in the relationship with my mother, I suspected, had led to a serious fissure in my narrative identity. I simply could not reconcile the woman she is today with the woman who brought me up: one whose acts suggest she has nothing but contempt for me, and one who was once so full of love. And that sent my autobiographical memories into disarray. How could I claim to know myself, my past, and my place in the world when I had misjudged one of the key figures who had shaped my life story?
One of my most treasured memories comes from when I was five years old. I am squeezed next to my mother in her floral armchair, and I am recounting a story that the teacher has been reading to the class at school, which my mother is writing out in neat handwriting on a clean sheet of white paper. She will later sew the pages together to form a little book. Eventually I would discover the name of the story: Fantastic Mr Fox (1970) by Roald Dahl. We could have easily borrowed the paperback from the local library, but that was not the point. What mattered was the ritual of sitting down each afternoon and reconstructing it together, repeating all the jokes that made me laugh even harder on my second telling.
Psychologists know that these kinds of interactions, structured around language, are essential training for building our mental autobiographies. Newborn babies, after all, have an astonishing capacity to learn new skills – to hold their head upright or crawl along the floor – but they don’t seem to encode specific events in so-called episodic memories. While a few people might claim to recall life-changing events like taking their first steps or tasting solid food for the first time, most people cannot remember anything before their third or fourth birthday (a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia).
The fact that our infantile amnesia ends so soon after we learn to talk is no coincidence. In one iconic study from 2010, Catriona Morrison and Martin Conway asked adults to describe the date of their earliest memories associated with words such as ‘ball’ or ‘Christmas’. On average, they found that those memories emerged a few months after the age at which the vocabulary is usually acquired. The words, it seems, act as cues for encoding and future retrieval – and without them, recollections of the events are lost to our future selves.
Conversations with adults are essential for the development of this process. When a child starts reminiscing, the adults around them can show an interest that validates the child’s attempt to give voice to their past and then nudge them to build on what they’ve said. This encouragement helps them to form a more detailed story around their recollections, which makes them more memorable – and, if the encouragement is lacking, the growth of their episodic memory can become stunted.
This backstory helps determine what our values and goals are, providing a sense of purpose
The structure of these stories becomes steadily more sophisticated across childhood. In infancy, our recollections mostly comprise isolated incidents, but we don’t really connect them together or question what they mean to us. By our teens, however, we begin to construct a complex narrative that connects the separate events into a coherent whole. We can see our life as a series of chapters, recognising the common themes between them, and the turning points that put us on our current trajectory.
The psychologist Dan McAdams describes this in a 2013 paper as the emergence of the ‘autobiographical author’. He writes:
The autobiographical author works to formulate a meaningful narrative for life, integrating the reconstructed episodic past and the imagined episodic future in such a way as to explain, for the self and for others, why the actor does what it does, why the agent wants what it wants, and who the self was, is, and will be as a developing person in time … The I becomes an autobiographical author; the Me becomes the story it tells.
McAdams argues that we use this story to make sense of events that occur in the present – whether our current behaviour aligns with the person that we believe ourselves to be – and our visions of ourselves in the future. It helps determine what our values and goals are, providing a sense of purpose. Every important decision is made with this backstory in mind. It is inherently subjective. In a later paper, McAdams writes:
Rather than a veridical testimony of what has objectively occurred in one’s past, narrative identity is an invented construction, a product of imagination and experience, designed to support a certain kind of life.
Like a sculptor with a lump of marble, the autobiographical author needs plenty of material to craft its narratives, selecting the details and events that best fit the plot while discarding the rest. This means that early conversations with parents continue to shape autobiographical memories well into adolescence. A child who has learned to elaborate on events will find it easier to identify the inflection points in their lives and to reflect on the lessons they drew from life’s downturns as they grow older.
The loss of that narrative structure was one of the first things I noticed during the estrangement: it had temporarily flattened my narrative arc, so that my life story felt more like a vague series of episodes than a flowing story. I know, theoretically, that certain events – such as my family moving from Yorkshire to Kent when I was 10 – were significant transitions. I know how hard my mother worked to help ensure that we were as comfortable as possible with our new life. I know that when I was bullied, she comforted me, and that she told me she was proud of me when I did well at school. I heard her say she was as excited by snow days as we children were; that our family had happy holidays on the English coast, and that we once drove through the night to see a solar eclipse; I know my mother and I would sometimes spend hours a day watching music videos together. As our communication broke down, however, I found those memories harder to access. They do not come to mind so easily now and, when they do, they feel dull and distant.
This may have been the result of a phenomenon known as ‘mood congruence’ – it’s often easier to recall things that reflect current feelings – but I suspect it was also a matter of self-protection. Comparing my mother’s care of me back then with her apparent rejection of me today was too painful, and so I simply stopped being able to reach those memories.
The one event that retains its original clarity – of me sitting in my mother’s armchair as I recount a story to her, while she writes it down – is especially precious for this reason. It connects me with her and my future as a writer, a single narrative thread that has survived intact.
Besides nurturing our narrative skills, our loved ones can help to embellish our backstory. My mother often told me how she had always known I would be impatient. She said she based this on the fact that, as a three-day-old baby, I started crying while she was still feeding my toddler brother. ‘Oh, please be quiet, David,’ she apparently snapped – not loudly, but harshly enough to upset my brother, who told her not to shout at ‘Little D’. From this tiny event I would come to be known – affectionately – as a determined yet impatient child.
We would also discuss her life before I was born, and her parents’. I heard how my grandmother’s house in York was bombed during the Second World War, but her wedding dress was miraculously spared. I learned how one day my grandfather was driving his young daughters through Kent when my mother’s elder sister opened the door and fell headfirst onto the road. (Like the white dress, she emerged unscathed.) I listened enraptured as my mother described how, as a young woman, she had travelled alone across France to meet her penfriend in Nice; how she had been so excited to be in another country that she stood in the corridor the whole way to watch the scenery go by. I discovered how, during their engagement, my mum would accompany my dad with a flask of tea on his night shifts as a lorry driver, just to spend time with him. I used to – and still do – think that it was far more romantic than a meal in an expensive restaurant.
The psychologist Dorthe Kirkegaard Thomsen and colleagues describe these recollections as ‘allobiographical memory’, and argue that they can be just as important for our sense of identity as the things we have experienced first-hand. Our allobiographical memories strengthen our connection to our family, friends and broader community, and imbue our lives with meaning.
We may complain about our elders repeating anecdotes, but hearing those familiar tales is a deep source of comfort
The fact that most of my allobiographical memories come from my parents’ and grandparents’ early adulthood is no coincidence; our personal narratives find their peak around the years that we come of age and forge our identities for the life ahead. This is known as a ‘reminiscence bump’, and it is evident in both the memories that we experience ourselves, and in the ones we borrow from those around us. The phenomenon can even be heard in our personal soundtrack. If you examine lists of people’s favourite songs and the memories they evoke, the most meaningful tracks tend to have been released around their late adolescence or early 20s. Intriguingly, however, we see a second and third spike in tracks released at the same points in our parents’ and even grandparents’ lives. This music is another point of connection that helps us to place our own story in a much broader narrative encompassing multiple lives.
I hadn’t realised how much I needed to hear the stories about my mother’s life until the possibility was no longer open to me. We may complain about our elders repeating the same anecdotes, but hearing those familiar tales is a deep source of comfort; they validate and strengthen our own origin story. Nudging my mother to talk about her past – sometimes the merest mention of a particular name was enough to bring back a slew of anecdotes – is one of the things I miss most about the time before our estrangement. Now that our communication is so limited, I can feel the stories fading. I had, perhaps foolishly, relied on her to hold these recollections: she was part of my extended mind, and now that those conversations are past, I fear that I have started to confuse some of the details, and I wish that I had kept better records of them when I still had the chance.
More than almost anything, I miss the idiosyncratic turns of phrase that she’d use when telling these tales. In her novel Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon) (1963), the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg presents an intimate portrait of her childhood and young adulthood solely through the conversations that reverberated around her house, with the unique rhythms, phrasings and motifs that come to be repeated across the decades within a family:
We live in different cities, some of us are abroad: and we don’t write often. When we meet, we can be indifferent or distracted. But one word, one phrase, is enough. One of those old sayings, heard and repeated an infinite number of times in our childhood … is enough to rediscover our former relationships, and our infancy and youth … Those phrases are the foundations of our family unit.
(My own translation.)
I first read Ginzburg’s novel at the beginning of the slow estrangement from my mother. I’ve tried to reconstruct our family lexicon, but my impoverished memory simply isn’t up to it; more often than not, her signature phrasing escapes me. One of my biggest regrets is the fact that I never told my mother what a wonderful storyteller she was, how she captured whole personalities with a single description, how much pleasure I felt simply hearing her talk. My dad has many amazing qualities, but mum was the primary curator of the events that established the family history.
Still, I try to cling on to the elements that are most easily accessible to me. On my own travels in France, I listen to the music of Françoise Hardy, the 1960s icon of Parisian chic who long ago helped to ignite my mother’s fascination with the country. One of the few photos I have seen of my mother in her youth shows her dressed in knee-high boots and a fashionable sweater, like her idol. Hearing those albums, I felt a little closer to the shy young woman travelling to Nice, as I imagined some of the hopes and dreams that she must have felt more than a decade before I was born.
There is something undeniably beautiful in the notion of our memories as a complex tapestry, woven with the people who love us; it is an act of cooperation. Whenever we reminisce with someone, we are helping to maintain the threads that we share: we are demonstrating just how closely our identities overlap, and this strengthens the bond between us. By replaying the most meaningful events of the past, we are emphasising the intention to remain close in the future, too.
As our relationship started to crumble, I came to suspect that my mother was consciously unpicking those ties. It was not only the missed phone calls and unanswered emails, but the ways she chose to reminisce, describing family events as if I had not been present. I remember tiny shifts in pronoun, from ‘we’ (which would have included me) to ‘your brother and I’. Whenever I pointed out how excluded I felt, she would simply brush me off. ‘You know I’ve always loved you,’ she would say – and then ghost me the next time I tried to phone her. I was left with the impression that she was deliberately extracting me from her story, and herself from mine.
The unravelling of my memories was far more painful than the sheer loss of contact. This should not have been a surprise; I have previously written about how autobiographical memories bolster mental resilience. One reason is the warm glow of nostalgia: after a bad day, recollections of happier times can act like a candle in the dark. Even more importantly, memories of battles won in the past can boost confidence in the ability to navigate difficulties in the present. Finally, a strong and coherent narrative can provide a sense of purpose in life: we know where we have come from, and where we are going.
Some struggle to see the connections between different events that helped to define them as a person
A weakened personal narrative can therefore contribute to mental illness in multiple ways. Some people have ‘overgeneralised’ memories, for instance, with a tendency to focus on extended periods rather than specific events. When asked about a time they were sad, for instance, they might say ‘my childhood’ rather than ‘the day my grandma died’; they might recall being happy ‘on holiday’ rather than ‘my 40th birthday meal in Paris’. Without the specific details of their past to draw upon, they find it harder to imagine the future, contributing to feelings of hopelessness and depression.
Others struggle to maintain a ‘coherent’ narrative; they struggle to see the connections between different events that helped to define them as a person. This undermines the feelings of agency and meaning that might come from a stronger sense of identity. Instead, they feel lost and ineffective, which can also lead to depression.
I felt all of this; as my childhood memories lost their depth and intensity, the future fell out of focus.
An acquaintance asked me if I was feeling a kind of grief for my mother; I can see the parallels. After any loss, the bereaved will experience a reorganisation of their mental autobiography. Fond recollections of the loved one may provide solace, but this comes with the painful knowledge that they are no longer available to share the reminiscences, validate their meaning or strengthen memory traces.
I am, of course, fortunate in the possibility of reconciliation, but this remains a slim hope. Instead – as many grievers experience – I am learning to grow around the hole that she has left. Despite everything, I have a renewed determination to live the life that I believe my childhood version of her would have wanted me to live.
One of my most treasured possessions is a reading journal that my mother gifted me when I first moved to London in my early 20s. The first book that I recorded was Alice Munro’s collection Runaway (2004). In the story ‘Silence’, a mother, Juliet, awaits news of her daughter Penelope, who has joined a cult-like community. Without any good explanation, Penelope cuts off communication with her mother, who is left floundering to identify reasons for the estrangement.
The story – which may have been partly autobiographical – had moved me at the time; rereading it today is even more painful, as I see a kind of mirror of my own life, with the child/parent roles reversed. At one point in the story, Juliet thinks:
It’s maybe the explaining to me she can’t face. Or has no time for, really. You know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason. And I could tell you plenty about what I did wrong. But I think the reason may not be something so easily dug out … My father used to say of someone he disliked that he had no use for that person. Couldn’t those words mean simply what they say? Penelope does not have a use for me.
Is this the truth about my mother? Like Juliet, I may never know. The people around me who know the intricacies of our relationship, such as my father, tell me that I’m not to blame; that mum’s behaviour is the product of recent life events beyond my control. No matter how many extenuating circumstances I try to consider, however, they cannot fully answer the question of why my mother would allow this estrangement to happen.
My brain, I know, is struggling to restore narrative coherence, and sometimes it is sorely tempting to rewrite my life story entirely, with events foreshadowing our estrangement from the moment I was born. This does not do me or my mother justice, though, and so I have decided to renounce the instincts of my ‘autobiographical author’ and make peace with the contradictions of the past and present. As Juliet concludes in Munro’s story: ‘She’s a conundrum, that’s all. I need to face that.’
My mother may always be a conundrum to me, but this much I know: she taught me the importance of kindness and honesty; she led me to trust in my own intelligence and resourcefulness; she encouraged me to pursue every interest and indulged my endless curiosity. She told me to seek happiness over wealth, and to remember that even the worst periods of pain would come to an end. She let me believe that I deserve to be loved.