Metro Pulse/Gamut/Sarah Van Arsdale

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Following the paths of memory with author Sarah Van Arsdale

by Paige M. Travis

What would happen if you lost your memory? Not just your recollection of what happened last night or the faces of your childhood friends, but all memory—your name, your history, your family—disappeared from your mind. Such an occurrence might be a blessing, a chance to start life over as a new person, a rebirth. Would you start your life over, turn yourself into a brand new person? Or would you feel like nobody, adrift with nothing to anchor you?

These are questions addressed in Blue, the new novel by Sarah Van Arsdale and winner of the Peter Taylor Prize, an award given yearly since 2000 by the Knoxville Writers Guild. The author is given a cash prize and the book is published by the University of Tennessee Press. Author and NPR book reviewer Alan Cheuse judged the top five of 455 submissions from the 2002 contestants. He is quoted on the book's cobalt jacket: "I was taken from the very beginning by the subtle, propulsive mix of lyrical and analytical prose in this compact but deep novel about identity and loss, memory and the moment, dream and the everyday life."

Blue is about a woman who finds herself, sans memory, in Intervale, Maine. The novel also follows the lives of her psychiatrist Dr. Bob Reichman, homeless woman and hospital patient Annie Blaze, and a townie named Rita LaPlatte. Memory—and the power it wields—is an issue with each of these characters, whose pasts and futures are twisted together like vines.

"I'm not sure why I'm so fascinated by memory, but I love thinking about it," says Van Arsdale, whose first novel Toward Amnesia is about a woman trying to forget her emotional pain. "Writing this made me wonder what the story would be of someone who really did have amnesia, and so I started writing Blue."

The kind of amnesia that the title character suffers—complete retrograde amnesia—is "very, very rare," and Van Arsdale admits to stretching science to suit her story. Blue, who names herself after the first word she conjures when paramedics interview her, can't remember anything, her first memories coming only in dreams and inklings. The situation is a bit fantastical, but the effect is profound. Blue consults her inner mind for how she feels and what she thinks, but because she doesn't have that database of past experiences on which we base our opinions, she is merely a detached observer of the world, of herself. And, where we might imagine that we'd panic or search wildly for answers, Blue hardly seems to care.

"Blue is oddly complacent about her predicament," Van Arsdale says. "This is, I think, often part of the constellation of symptoms in amnesia, and in some other conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, as Dr. Reichman notes about halfway through the book. There is something called la belle indifference—just what it sounds like—the beautiful indifference—which allows the patient to just not care."

By the time Blue begins to suspect that there's a reason she has amnesia, a trauma that put her in this state, she's already built a life in Intervale. She has a small apartment, works as a waitress, and has a dog. Even as she wants to know who she is, she hesitates to pursue the memories and give up the new life, one that might be better than what she had before. Dr. Reichman asks her to talk about and write down the flashes of her past she pictures, but one memory—of finding her mother passed out on the beach—she won't mention. "She isn't sure why she still won't tell Dr. Reichman about this memory: because she's so ashamed of it, because she doesn't want to believe it, or because it might hold the most clues, and maybe, then, she'd have to begin to leaving him, leaving her new life, and the past would become the future, too, and her time in Intervale, her now, her here, would just be an interlude. An interlude that's coming to an end."

Characters in Blue are helpless to their memories, victims of the mind's mysteries. Dr. Reichman is helping Blue with her predicament, but he has some of his own. He is plagued by the memory of the wife who left him. His father, who has Alzheimer's, moves in with him. Reichman was raised Jewish and feels guilty about not practicing his faith, which is also Van Arsdale's.

"Judaism is, in many ways, about remembering. And not just regarding the Holocaust, she says. "The Jewish calendar cycles around the remembrance of the holidays, including some of the ancient rituals, such as blowing the ram's horn on Rosh Hashanah. The Passover seder is about re-telling, and remembering, the story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt. So it only made sense to me to weave in that view of memory."

Blue is refreshingly free from pop culture references; the resulting tone is mature and literary. It evokes Blue's feelings of being disconnected from the world—can you imagine not recognizing songs on the radio?—and Van Arsdale's distaste for certain modern contrivances.

"I don't feel entirely comfortable in the contemporary world," she says. "I often feel as if I am from another time, an older time, like before chain bookstores for example. I try to ignore those parts of our contemporary world that don't agree with me: chain stores, expensive telephones that don't work, much of popular culture. Or maybe it's more that I try to choose judiciously.

"But I also wanted the book to be somewhat suspended in a place outside of time, because it's so much about memory and the loss of memory. I wanted to give the reader a feeling of not being sure what time we were in, just as Blue isn't sure about how she is placed in time."

The novel is a kind of mystery whose loose ends tie together, for the most part, in the last few pages. Van Arsdale teaches with the New York Writers' Workshop at the Jewish Community Center in the Big Apple. In addition to being a staff writer at Designer Monthly Magazine, she is working on her next novel.

"After writing Toward Amnesia, I wanted to try writing bigger books, with more action and more characters. Now, I'm writing something with a seemingly endless parade of characters, and I wonder where I'm going to draw the line, or if I'm just going to keep going and include everyone in the northern hemisphere."

The author will read from Blue at the Oct. 9 meeting of the Knoxville Writers' Guild.

"When Toward Amnesia came out, I found it very disconcerting to read from it; I had an odd, almost out-of-body feeling of disconnection that here was a little story that was just all mine, suddenly laid out for the public. It wasn't so much a fear that it would be rejected as an odd disconnect between the external and internal worlds. But I'm kind of a ham, and I only get a little nervous about reading. I like it when the audience asks me questions, but then again, I hope that I've answered all their questions in the book, because the book is really what's important."