Here’s an end-of-2024 quiz: What did you do on April 21? What did you eat for dinner on Oct. 2? Can you name a top headline from Aug. 15?
If you’ve got nothing, I feel you.
Which brings me to the actress Marilu Henner, who famously has a rare condition that grants her incredible autobiographical memory. When I had the chance to meet Ms. Henner last December, she asked for my birth date. “That was a Friday,” she said. “‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ had just been released. And oh, I tried a dessert called the Junkyard with friends in upstate New York.”
It was astonishing, though it also brought a strange grief for all the moments from my life I could not remember with any specificity. How much did I truly recall from the hectic blur of my former career as a women’s magazine editor, during which there’d been any number of outlandish moments? What about all the friends from high school and college I’d since lost touch with? Shouldn’t I possess more memories of my late father, who’d worked as a cross-country truck driver and took me on road trips when I was a child? What did we talk about over those thousands of miles? Where did we go?
The realization that I pay money to back up my devices but invest nothing to make sure such valuable remnants from my life are preserved prompted me to search for tips on improving my memory. The suggestions — get plenty of sleep, eat veggies, do logic puzzles — seemed like decent advice. But all the zzz’s, leafy greens and Wordle in the world were never going to catapult me into Ms. Henner’s that-was-the-day-I-tried-Rollerblading-for-the-first-time-and-Howard-Dean-dropped-out-of-the-Democratic-primary league of memory champs.
Then it occurred to me that if I really did want to remember a few gems about each passing day, why not simply write them down? As a novelist who compulsively revises even the most basic sentences, I worried that a diary would suck hours from each day. But I thought of my sister, Keri, who used to keep a wall calendar stashed under her bed when we were kids. Each night, she’d scratch down one word to sum things up: Cheerleading! Mall! Party!
My daily record of adulthood was bound to sound a lot less fun, but I decided to attempt something similar. My ground rules: 1. Keep it brief. 2. No revising. 3. No looking back until the end of the year, since that risked my breaking rule No. 2.
