significance of memories

Throughout the piece On keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion, she claims that keeping a notebook is important because not only does it allow the keeper of the notebook to write and remember anything at that instant, but it also lets them record how they felt at that particular moment; whether the facts of that event are true or not.  Similar assertions are found in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, except instead of a notebook being important, O’Brien stresses the importance of memories and their purpose for his novel.  Didion writes, “But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’ ”.  Everything ever written was created entirely for the writer and no one else, it may have some impact for others, “I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people” but its main purpose is for the writer, its their own personal  outlet from the world that lets them record information important to them; “we are talking about something private… an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker”.  

O’Brien, with similar ideas in mind, writes how memories are significant because they make a story real to both the author and the writer, “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present” (pg.172).  Memories can produce any feeling the writer chooses to show, giving someone a feel for how someone felt at a particular moment or how they wish they had felt, similar to Didion’s assertion; “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God.  I can be brave. I can make myself feel again” (pg. 172).  They create illusions meant only for those the memory belongs too, O’Brien talks about how the memory of the man killed on a path stays with him because depending on what he chooses to believe the memory reminds him how he killed that man or how he didn't kill him; “For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die… I did not kill him… But listen. Even that story is made up… Here is the story-truth… I killed him.” (pg. 171-172).  His memory of that day gives him the illusion he didn’t kill that man near My Khe, or that he had in fact took away his life.  Throughout his whole novel Tim uses memories to tell his war stories, giving readers the same illusions the memories give him.  These assertions between On keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien are similar because not only do they both allow the owner of a notebook or a memory ability to show and record details of significance to them but it lets them also show that illusion to others in a way they might find it of personal significance as well.