Some people keep journals. When those people write their autobiographies, they can check the records.
Other people have good memories.
It's probably also more important for it to be a good story than for it to be 100% accurate.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
38 points (97.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
44251 readers
582 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Many autibiographies are personal whitewashing. So it is more a question of creativity than of memory.
Almost all, would be more accurate. And some even unintentional, we tend to unconsciously modify our memory to make ourselves look better
Human memory is quite unreliable. Even if they remember, a significant portion will be fiction.
My understanding is that a lot of memoirs are ghost written, so rarely actually authored by the person they are about. They interview people and then most likely invent detail to fill in the rest. That or they find actual photos of events or things and build out the detail that way. If you have a picture of an event and can see the decorations you can probably guess or imagine the smell. Likewise if family members have selfies or things like that you can fill in their outfits from there
This is very much true. Ghost writing is also done to keep the voice of the author, as much as possible. Doug Stanhope, notable comedian, drunk, and drug abuser, has a very entertaining book called Digging Up Mother. There’s no way he remembers all this stuff, and he admits it. But in the audiobook versions, he adds meta-asides that indicate when a name is fake, for example, or add a story that contextualizes something, or he’ll straight up say “I’m tired, so-and-so is taking over” and let someone else read, making it a much more authentic experience of how an “autobiography” comes together.
I'm guessing a lot of it sort of comes back to you as you're writing your memoir. My grandparents both wrote one and it also helps that they had a lot of photos to jog their memories. They also grew up in Europe during WW2 so a lot of memories stood out to them 😅
I've been trying to write a memoir and this is legitimately true. I have basically no concrete memory of my childhood, but when I start writing what I do remember it opens some floodgates. Admittedly I still have to fill in a lot of gaps with what I think is funniest.
It definitely varies between people as well. For instance, my sister (with no genetic relation to me) has much better memory than me, which seemed almost superhuman to me when I was growing up. Although, I have since realized that my memory is much worse than average, to the extent where I probably have one or more memory disorders. I'm sure that some people have memory that is much better than average, whether or not my sister is one of them.
You talk to people you shared those experiences with. Someone is bound to have remembered something different you didn't
James Frey has entered the chat
On a related note, I don't remember the best resources I've come across, but here's something for a bit of an idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_error
Legally, there is the concept of contemporaneous notes in many countries. Meaning if you write something down shortly after the event occured it can have legal validity.
There is also hypnotherapy, EMDR, and other forms of therapy, where many people can access memories that they couldn't. I was surprised myself how many memories I could access with EMDR.
I find the concept appears to be similar to meditation and lots of sensory information + association. How stuff felt, sounded, smelled, where you felt in your body etc.
Less related, but there's also Method of Loci etc. to remember lots of very specific things
You may have aphantasia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Read https://archive.is/iMdvd for more info about it