Memory Wall

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness or death and religious discrimination.

“On a half-page ripped from a brochure, one phrase is shakily and repeatedly underlined: Memories are located not inside the cells but in the extracellular space.”

This brochure phrase—on the surface, a concrete statement about neurological structures—subtly introduces the story’s thematic focus on The Intersection of Personal and Collective History. Anthony Doerr draws attention to its significance by noting that Alma has repeatedly underlined it to encourage contemplation on why that phrase is important to her and to the story’s themes. Metaphorically, the brain cells represent individuals while the extracellular space represents all humanity, thus tying individual identity and memory to a shared historical consciousness.

“Alma would have preferred amnesia: a quicker, less cruel erasure. This was a corrosion, a slow leak. Seven decades of stories, five decades of marriage, four decades of working for Porter Properties, too many houses and buyers and sellers to count—spatulas and salad forks, novels and recipes, nightmares and daydreams, hellos and goodbyes. Could it all really be wiped away?”

This list of the things that define Alma’s life, summarized so briefly, creates an ironic contrast. It highlights the vast difference between how significant her life is to her and how insignificant it can seem on a larger time scale in which nothing lasts. The cruelty of dementia lies in the fact that this loss of memory and identity occurs before death, so Alma must be a witness to her own erasure.

“‘It tends to unravel very quickly, without these treatments,’ he said. ‘Every day it will become harder for you to be in the world.’”

The story’s main conflict pits the individual against time and the inevitability of death. In this quote, Dr. Amnesty establishes the stakes of this conflict for Alma. His succinct description of what she will experience has an understated quality but still manages to evoke solemnity and convey the gravity of what it means to lose one’s memories.