Memory Wall

Memory Wall (2010) is a collection of short stories by Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See (2014). Doerr’s writing career began in 2002, with the publication of his short story collection The Shell Collector (2002), and he is also the author of novels About Grace (2004) and Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021), and a memoir titled Four Seasons in Rome (2007). Memory Wall won the 2011 Story Prize and was named a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, among other honors. Through the six stories featured in the collection, Doerr explores themes including Memory’s Role in Identity, Loss, and Preservation, The Intersection of Personal and Collective History, and The Balance Between Loss and Renewal.

This guide refers to the 2010 Scribner e-book edition. This edition does not include the story “The Deep,” which appears as a bonus story in the paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of racism, religious discrimination, illness, death, child abuse, child death, suicidal ideation, death by suicide, and animal death.

Plot Summaries

The six stories in Memory Wall are tied together by the concept of memory, though each approaches the subject from a different angle. They take place in cities and villages around the world, featuring multiple narrative perspectives, varied writing styles, and protagonists from wildly different walks of life. 

The first story, which may be considered a novella, is “Memory Wall.” Set in Cape Town, South Africa in the near future, it introduces an element of science fiction in the form of technology that allows memories to be extracted, recorded, and relived. Alma Konachek is a 74-year-old woman with dementia, cared for by Pheko, a man who has worked for the Konachek family for 15 years. He’s devastated to learn that Alma’s legal representative plans to put her in a memory care home and sell her house since he relies on his income to care for his son Temba.

Because of Alma’s status as a wealthy white woman, privileged memory technology is available to her, and she has hundreds of memory cartridges pinned to a wall in her home. One of them contains a memory that reveals a valuable secret: the location of a rare fossil her husband discovered in the desert just before dying of a heart attack four years ago. A con artist named Roger is determined to steal that memory so that he can cash in on the fossil. He recruits a teenage boy named Luvo as his “memory tapper,” and together, they break into Alma’s home night after night, searching for the right memory. Hearing an intruder one night, Alma shoots and kills Roger just after they find what they’re looking for. Luvo gets away unseen and, with the needed information from Alma’s memory, finds the rare fossil. He sells it to a collector for a large sum, most of which he gives to Pheko and Temba. Luvo then treats himself to a book and a stay in a nice hotel, knowing that the short life span of memory tappers means he doesn’t have long to live.

In “Procreate, Generate,” Imogene and Herb decide they’re ready to have children after 10 years of marriage. However, 16 months go by and they’re unable to conceive. Tests reveal they both have infertility factors, so they opt to try in vitro fertilization (IVF), and Imogene begins fertility treatments. The costly procedure is unsuccessful, which takes a large emotional toll on each of them and on their relationship. Imogene withdraws and is tempted to simply pack a bag and leave her life behind, while Herb is tempted to have an affair. They resist these temptations, agree to try IVF again, and are anxiously awaiting the results when the story ends.

In “The Demilitarized Zone,” Davis reads letters from his son, who’s fighting in the Korean War, while he helps his father deal with dementia and faces the dissolution of his own marriage. Davis’s wife has moved in with her boyfriend, and he withholds their son’s most recent letters from her. In one letter, Davis’s son writes about his illness from intestinal parasites and about burying a crane that he saw die after flying out of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). When Davis learns his son will be sent home soon, either because of his illness or because he left camp to bury the crane without leave, Davis delivers the box of his son’s letters to his wife.

The residents of “Village 113” are required to leave their homes, which will be flooded by a government dam project. Despite most villagers being excited that the government will pay for them to move to modern resettlement districts, the seed keeper fears that her home’s history will be lost when the village is submerged. She and the village schoolteacher find comfort in their friendship and overcome their sense of powerlessness by writing letters in protest of the dam. Torn between submitting to the government or staying and drowning with the village, she ultimately chooses to resettle, thus preserving the village’s seeds and memories.

In “The River Nemunas,” 15-year-old Allison moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather after both parents die. Grieving and seeking a connection to her mother’s past, Allison begins fishing the same river that her mother fished as a child. Allison’s grandfather insists there are no more sturgeon in the river, but when Allison hooks a 10-foot sturgeon, he learns the value of believing in things unseen.

Esther Gramm, the protagonist of “Afterworld,” is the only girl from her Jewish orphanage in Hamburg to survive the Holocaust. Dual timelines depict her childhood in Hamburg, where she first began having epileptic seizures accompanied by strange visions, and her life in Ohio at the age of 81, as she nears death. Now her seizures bring visions of her 11 childhood friends, all killed at Auschwitz, waiting for her in the afterworld. This brings her peace in her final moments.