The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók is gorgeous.

I’ll say it again: gorgeous. I never thought I’d find a book where how it was written interested me more than its content (a staple of my recreational reading diet being sci-fi novels), so this was an illuminating experience. So lovingly crafted is each chapter, tailored exceptionally to fit her story, that it almost feels as if the whole thing were imagined, lived vicariously through the characters on the page. What I’m trying to say is that Bartók writes very well. Almost too well…

Wait a second. This is a memoir, isn’t it? Well, she writes about growing up living with her manic depressive, schizophrenic mom, and how that affected her as an adult, and how she dealt with her mom as an adult. That all seems pretty autobiographical. It’s not a boring account, by any means, but how did she make me care, right from the first few pages? I’ve read biographies about Dave Grohl and Bill Watterson, icons of worlds I had dreams of living in. I’ve read memoirs by Steve Martin and Anthony Bourdain, guys I occasionally crush on. Mira Bartók was a name completely new to me until I picked up this book, and if all she was selling were bittersweet memories of a saga maybe a fraction of the population can relate to, what kept me turning pages until I couldn’t keep my eyes open in morning’s earliest hours?

First of all, peoples’ memories aren’t what they used to be. Joshua Foer writes in Moonwalking With Einstein how, in the time before mass production of books was possible, scholars had no choice but to memorize the information passed on to them by their mentors: “Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.” Nowadays, people may use any number of memory aides, depriving their brains of the mental exercises it would take in order to remember just about everything. As fickle as the memory is for most of us, Bartók still provides astoundingly vivid episodes from her childhood. Even more impressive is that she does this after suffering a brain injury from a car accident in 1999. If I try and remember anything from the year I was eight years old, I first have to figure out what grade I was in, from there deduce who my friends were, then look up those friends on Facebook so I can just ask them what they remember.

Bartók addresses the hazy nature of memories early and often. In the first chapter, titled “Subterranean World,” she begins to describe the psychological process that inspired her to record what she remembers of her mother:

            Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur. But neuroscientists say that is how memory works—it is complex and mercurial, a subterranean world that changes each time we drag something up from below. (29)

However, this understanding doesn’t stop her from second guessing her recollections in later chapters. When her and her mother are separated in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Bartók remembers not quite believing her mother could abandon her, but she knew, even at the age of nine, that her mother couldn’t be held completely responsible for her actions. She comes up with three scenarios that “could have happened,” never really committing to any one over the others. Two of the options outline a relieved yet guilt-stricken mother reuniting with her scared daughter, and a simple miscommunication, but everything leading up to this point suggests the third option as the true memory: “Cleveland is burning all around us in the sixties; the world is on fire—the river, the dying lake, my mother’s beautiful brain.”

The complexity of a web of memories fashioned thru ought a lifetime is incomprehensible. What clever Bartók does to arrange her book is utilize the very mnemonic device she uses to organize her memory. After finding hope for her untrustworthy memory in her knack for the visual arts, she builds herself a memory palace. This age-old technique allows a person to affix an image of what they’re trying to remember to a room in an imaginary building; by walking through the palace in her mind, Bartók is able to relive moments with her mother. Each chapter opens with a new addition to her palace, and as I said before, the narrative flows smoothly as Bartók connects images to memories and never is a metaphor forgotten. In the chapter called the “Eye of Goya,” we learn through a common interest that she is very much her mother’s daughter: “My mother and I loved artists and famous people who suffered from horrible afflictions, like Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Anne Frank.”

So, whether or not Bartók has a really good memory is beside the point, because what she’s done with her memories provides the best evidence of her book being an exemplary work of creative nonfiction. Mimi Schwartz tells her students in the essay “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” to “go for the emotional truth, that’s what matters.” This is exactly what Bartók does. I can accept the brilliantly crafted prose now that I see how the author used her gifted imagination to sharpen the edges of fuzzy memories. I don’t know why I doubted its authenticity in the first place.