The three sources writers draw on: Imagination, Research, Memory

Some last thoughts on Anthony Doerr's "Memory Wall" after last night's book group, at which everyone was impressed with the quality of this story connection and with the unusual connections among the stories - both in style and in theme, all the more striking because the settings and the characters are so dramatically different. I talked about the dichotomies or dissonance among the stories: the attraction to great moments of historical crisis (e.g., the Holocaust, the Depression, Apartheid) or personal tragedy (the many characters orphaned in early childhood or late adolescence) set up against the sweet, optimistic, almost sentimental endings to the stories: characters do good things for one another, the world is apparently not as horrible and random as it appears (to some). Also the contrast between the rather exotic settings, not what you'd expect from a writer based in Idaho, and the rather formal traditionalism - at least 80s traditionalism, with the many short segments - of the form. We talked about wither the title story, in which memories are "harvested" from the brain - is a form of sci-fi, and I suggested, no, more like futurism: in fact, the memory wall (a literal wall in which the cartridges, each of which contains a bit of the character's memory, as arranged - an these cartridges are stole and sold on the black market - people want to experience the memories of others) isn't all that different from You-Tube, in which we can "experience" the "memories" of strangers around the world. Other characters throughout these stories struggle to reclaim their memories - which is, after all, what a writer does. I noted that writers draw on three (and only three?) sources: memory, imagination, research. Oddly, for all his interest in memory and how it's our memories that give a shape and a meaning to our lives, in my view seems to draw primarily on imagination and research. I would suspect - I'm not sure - that he hasn't been to all the places he writes about and that the characters (with possible exception of Robert in Afterworld?) are not portraits of the artist.