Novel’s narrative built on memory’s fallible foundation

We like to think we remember things exactly as they happened, exactly as they were. But memories can be slippery. They can be fragmented. Can they ever really be relied upon?

Winnipeg author M.C. Joudrey wrestles with these ideas in his latest novel, Marmalade Parade (Guernica Editions), which came out earlier this month and will be launched Saturday at McNally Robinson Grant Park.

The initial seeds for the book were planted when Joudrey, 49, began watching family members struggle with memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer’s.

“And the really baffling nature of those diseases is how somebody who’s known you for 50 years suddenly doesn’t know you at all, or has no recollection of decades and decades of history,” he says.

But even if one doesn’t suffer from a medical condition that attacks memory, our memories are not as infallible as we like to believe, especially when it comes to shared experiences, because other people have memories, too.

“There’s a number of scenarios that play out in the novel that express exactly that,” he says. “Arguments happen, and people are so confident about their points of argument — you know, you said this, and then that other person says, no, I didn’t. So who’s right?”

Marmalade Parade does not follow a traditional linear narrative. In the first section, our unnamed first-person narrator arrives at a remote house owned by a man suffering from illness affecting his memory, and both men need to puzzle out why they have been brought together.

The second section is an estate auction, lives recounted in objects. The last section, Paperwork, is a clinical corporate conversation closing out the case.

The estate-sale auction gets readers thinking about the relationship to their own belongings, how much identity — and memory — we derive from them.

“I wanted to explore the idea of: do we actually own anything, or are we just holding it for the next generation? The things that we own, do we leave any imprints upon them? Is there anything that we can learn from the person that lived with those belongings?” he says.

Joudrey, as it happens, is an avid collector himself, which adds a meta layer to the auction section.

“It is a constant conversation in the house,” he says with a laugh. “I have some rare butterflies, a big record collection, the list goes on and on. The ephemera, oh, the ephemera is almost staggering. Do I just begin to sell it now? Or am I just going to keep enjoying these things? Because I do enjoy them. That is, I think, the power of nostalgia.”

Nostalgia, obviously, plays a big role in a novel about memory. In the book, the protagonist recounts his earliest memory, in which he is given a toy truck by his father, and the truck is red.

“And the antagonist says, ‘Well, how do you know it was red?’ And he goes, ‘Because I remember that it was red.’ And the antagonist says, ‘Yeah, but you have a picture of it? Do you still own it? Do you have any proof that it’s red at all? It’s your oldest memory. How do you know it’s not green?’” Joudrey says.

“I think about this a lot. I have these memories, and I rely on them as the foundation of who I am. We rely on the most unreliable things to become who we are.”

And even our most treasured, foundational memories are distorted by the smudged lens through which we view them.

“There’s some tragicomedy in there,” Joudrey says. “Nostalgia is steeped in this custard-coloured celluloid memory, and it is beautiful and glittering and completely unreliable.”

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