Glory Days & Borrowed Memories: What We Remember, What We Forget, and What It Means for the Characters We Write
What Reminiscing with Old Friends Taught Me About Writing Real Characters
There's something almost magical about an evening spent with old friends you’ve known for most of your life, sharing stories, and rehashing the past.
A few nights ago, I had dinner with five friends I went to high school with. Three of them I see with some regularity—we work from home, keep flexible schedules, and try to meet for lunch every few months.
But the other two I hadn't seen in person in twenty and thirty years.
We caught up, as you do. There were a number of those obligatory “what are you up to now?” and “how are the kids/any grandkids yet?” and “do you remember/has anyone seen or heard from so-and-so?”
Some of these friends follow me and social media, and since I share SO MUCH (too much, my partner constantly reminds me), many of my own “what I’ve been up to” stories were merely for the few who haven’t seen my YouTube, Instagram and Facebook posts.
And then, as the evening stretched and more rounds of drinks arrived, we slid almost inevitably into what Bruce Springsteen might have called talking about our “glory days.” The shared stories. The common mythology of a particular time and place that only we—that specific configuration of six longtime friends—could fully inhabit together.
I love that part of any reunion more than I can properly articulate. Everyone becomes a storyteller. There’s a generosity to it, a willingness to offer up your memory as a gift to the table, to say here, I kept this for us, let me give it back to you.
And for a couple of hours, you’re not in your late fifties, you’re not someone’s parent or grandparent, or someone’s boss or someone’s former colleague or ex-spouse. You’re just the same band of idiots you always were, doing the same dumb things you always did, except now you can laugh at it properly.
But here’s what struck me the morning after, when I was reflecting on the evening the way I tend to do with experiences I’m still processing: the memories weren’t consistent.
Not in a troubling way that suggested anyone was being dishonest or self-serving. Just in the perfectly ordinary, completely human way that memory actually works. One person would launch into a story with enormous confidence and detail—the exact location, the specific day, month, and year, who said what to whom—and someone else at the table would nod along enthusiastically while a third person wore the expression of someone politely waiting to confess they have absolutely no recollection of any of it. Not a fragment. Not even the vague sense that something like that might have happened. Nothing.
We’re all between fifty-six and fifty-eight years old. I’d like to blame age for this, and maybe age plays a role. But I don’t think that’s really the heart of it.
There’s something intriguing about the shared memory we think that we own.
Here’s what I’ve been chewing on: how much of what we “remember” isn’t actually memory at all? How much of it is borrowed—absorbed from other people’s accounts of events we were technically present for, told to us so many times over the years that the story has become the memory, and the original experience (if we ever properly encoded it in the first place) has been quietly replaced?
There’s a body of research in cognitive psychology on exactly this—the constructive, reconstructive, and sometimes frankly unreliable nature of human memory.
Elizabeth Loftus, one of the foremost researchers in the field, spent decades demonstrating that memory is not a recording device. It’s something closer to a living document, continuously edited by subsequent experience, suggestion, emotion, and retelling.
We don’t retrieve memories so much as we rebuild them, each time, from whatever materials are currently available to us.
Which means that what my friends and I were doing around that table was not simply reminiscing. We were collaboratively rebuilding our shared past in real time. We were, in the truest sense, writing a collective story—with all the attendant inconsistencies, gaps, and embellishments that storytelling involves.
And one moment in particular stopped me cold.
I brought up something I’d done—a specific incident of something I’d done when in my early twenties that had weighed on me, on and off, for more than thirty years. I won’t go into the details here because they belong to me and to the person involved, but the short version is this: I had done something that felt, to me, like a betrayal. It was a small thing by any objective measure. But it’s something I had carried with a relatively heavy guilt for decades. I can still feel the texture of that guilt—the way it would surface unexpectedly, the way I’d wince at the memory of my own behavior (or perhaps lack of behavior, because it was a situation where I wish I’d done something instead of not acting upon how I felt in that moment)
But when I mentioned it, the friend who had been on the receiving end of what I’d done (or rather failed to do) looked at me with genuine puzzlement.
They didn’t remember it. At all.
Not “Oh yeah, I remember but I forgave you a long time ago.” Not “Sure I remember but it doesn’t matter now.” Not even “I remember but I’d rather not talk about it.”
They simply had no memory of the event whatsoever. To them, it had not registered as significant enough to retain. To me, it had been a small ulcer burned into my psyche in the way that only the things we do that violate our own sense of who we want to be can affect us.
It’s the same event with the same two people present. And yet there are completely different experiences of it—not just in the years since, but apparently in the moment itself.
That’s not a failure of memory. That’s memory doing exactly what it’s designed to do: filtering, prioritizing, and retaining what matters to each of us based on who we are, what we value, what we’re attending to, and what we need to carry forward.
As I often do, when I think about things like this, I reflect not just on the personal learning experience but also on how it’s something I can leverage as a writer and in the characters I create. If you’re a writer (and if you’re reading this, you likely are) I want you reflect on what I just described for a moment, because I think it’s enormously useful.
We talk a lot in writing circles about point of view. We talk about whose head we’re in, whose eyes the reader is seeing a scene or story through, the technical mechanics of first person versus third person limited versus omniscient.
And those are all genuinely important conversations. But I don’t think we talk nearly enough about something more fundamental than POV mechanics: the question of what each character actually notices, what they actually retain, and how radically those things can differ from character to character based on nothing more than who they are.
Every person who was sitting around that table with me the other night experienced the same evening. The same restaurant, the same after dinner pub, the same walk between the two places, the same conversations, the same rounds of drinks.
And yet each of us will walk away with a different version of it. We’ll remember different moments. We’ll attach different emotional weight to different exchanges. We’ll tell the story of the evening differently when we recount it to our partners or friends who weren’t there.
And this isn’t because any of us is wrong, but because we are different people with different nervous systems and different histories and different things we’re tuned to pay attention to.
Now transpose that concept to your fiction.
If your characters feel like they all experience the world the same way—if they all notice the same details, remember the same events with the same clarity, assign the same emotional significance to the same moments—they’re going to feel thin. They’re going to feel like they’re all wearing slightly different costumes over the same basic human template. Because real people don’t work that way.
Thinking about this reminds me of advice that Brooklyn writer Denis Hamill offered to me many years back when I’d asked for some advice when writing my novel A Canadian Werewolf in New York. The simple piece of advice he offered is something I still cherish (and still do) to this day.
He suggested that I take a walk with one of my characters and then pay attention to what THEY notice in a particular environment. What is it they attend to? What do they comment on? What don’t they even see? How is that different that what I notice or attend to? How about a different character from that same book? What would they experience walking that same walk?
This exercise allows me to walk through the same neighborhood numerous times in ways that make it fresh and new and unique. It’s good for improving my writing, exercising my imagination, and preventing boredom from passing along an all-too-familiar path.
Think about your antagonist. The antagonist of your story is almost never the villain of their own story. They are the protagonist. They have their own internally coherent moral logic, their own wounds that haven’t healed, their own version of events in which they are the wronged party or the misunderstood idealist or the person who simply had to make hard choices that others weren’t brave enough to make.
And that version of events is built from their particular memories, their particular experience of what happened and why and who is responsible. When they walk down that same street, they’re likely to notice or attend to different things than your protagonist does. Or possibly, they notice the same things, but they see them differently.
What did your antagonist attend to in the critical moments that shaped them? What did they fail to notice—not because they’re stupid or evil, but because their attention was drawn elsewhere by the particular configuration of their fears and desires?
What have they been carrying around, like I carried around my guilt, that might not even register as significant to the person on the other side of the table? And conversely: what did someone do to them that they remember with crystalline vividness, that the other person has entirely forgotten—or experienced so differently as to be functionally a different event?
These are not just interesting questions. They are the architectural questions of character. Get them right, and your characters will feel like they have an interior life that exists beyond the edges of the page.
One of the most practical things I took away from that reunion dinner the other night was a renewed appreciation for the concept of selective attention. Not as a cognitive curiosity, but as a character-building tool.
Each of us, in any given moment, is paying attention to a narrow slice of everything that’s happening. We’re built this way—the brain can’t consciously process every piece of available sensory information simultaneously, so it filters, and the filter is calibrated by our current emotional state, our personality, our past experience, and what we expect to find.
A person who grew up in a household where conflict meant danger is going to notice tension between people at a dinner table that someone from a calmer background might not register at all.
A person who spent years in customer service is going to notice the way a server is treated by other diners. A former athlete is going to notice posture and movement. A writer—and I say this with full self-implicating awareness—might be more likely to notice the story in what everyone else is doing.
Your characters should work the same way. What does each one of them notice when they walk into a room? Not “what is the reader supposed to know about the room,” but what does this specific person, with their specific history and preoccupations, actually clock?
The detail that one character finds completely irrelevant is the detail that another character can’t stop thinking about.
And that difference—that gap between what is noticed and what is ignored—is a form of characterization that’s often more revealing than anything a character actually says.
There’s also something to be said for the way memory and guilt interact. The thing I carried for thirty years had weight precisely because it mattered to me—it touched something about how I see myself, about the kind of person I want to be, about a standard I felt I’d failed to meet.
My friend’s forgetting wasn’t indifference; it was simply that the incident didn’t land the same way on their particular moral landscape. They weren’t keeping a ledger of the same entries I was.
Your characters have ledgers. Most of them are tracking things—grievances, failures, moments of unexpected kindness, instances where they felt seen or unseen—that other characters don’t even know are being tracked.
A character who has spent years nursing a wound from something another character has completely forgotten is not simply being oversensitive. They’re being human. And when that gap finally surfaces in your story—when one character finally says do you even remember what you did and the other character genuinely doesn’t—that moment can be devastating in exactly the way the best fiction is devastating: because it’s true.
I don’t usually end these pieces with tidy checklists—that’s not really how my scattered brain works—but I do want to leave you with a few things to carry into your own writing.
When you’re developing a character, consider building what I’d call their memory profile. Not their backstory in the conventional sense—not just the list of things that happened to them—but the answer to a more specific question: what do they actually remember, and why?
What has stayed with them in vivid detail? What have they suppressed or reconstructed? What are they carrying that no one around them knows they’re carrying? And what has happened to them that they’ve already largely forgotten, even though it mattered enormously to someone else?
Consider the moments in your story where two characters experienced the same event. Even if you only write one version of that scene, know the other version. Know what the scene felt like from inside the other character’s experience, what they noticed and what they didn’t, how they’ve told that story to themselves in the years since. That shadow scene—the one that never appears on the page—can still inform so much about how that other character reactions and interacts in different moments.
And finally, let your characters be wrong about each other’s memories. Let one character be absolutely certain that the other remembers something, and let that certainty be mistaken.
Let the conversation where that comes out be genuinely surprising to both of them—because it should be. Because that’s what it felt like, sitting around a restaurant table a few nights ago, realizing that the thing I’d been carrying for thirty years had never actually landed anywhere except inside me.
That’s the kind of truth that fiction is built to hold. The kind that doesn’t resolve neatly, doesn’t offer consolation, but it just opens a space and says: look, here, this is what it is to be a person trying to remember another person in a world where memory is never quite as shared as we’d like it to be.
We were all there that night. And we each came home with a different story of what happened.
That’s not a problem to be solved. That’s the whole thing. And that’s a powerful thing for me to remember when I’m writing and storytelling.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of more than thirty books that include the Canadian Werewolf urban fantasy novels as well as books for writers that include Publishing Pitfalls for Authors and The Relaxed Author (co-authored with Joanna Penn). He reflects on writing and life in his weekly Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing Podcast which you can find at starkreflections.ca.
Interesting and helpful. My brother (younger by 4 years) and I don't see each other often, "do you remember ..." is often the question he'll ask. And yes, things that were significant for him are often "Nope" for me.
I should know this stuff and bring it more consciously into my writing—I spent ten years working with the results of cognitive assessments as a special education teacher and caseworker, and saw the impacts of impaired memory processing on some students.
Maybe it’s subconscious because I did bring unreliable memories in as a subtext in my Martiniere books.