Loss. Learning. Memory. Three themes in the short stories of Anthony Doerr

Some (recurring) themes in Athony Doerr's excellent story collection "Memory Wall" include: Loss. Doerr seems particularly drawn to stories about or characters who have experienced sudden, dramatic, tragic losses: in Procreate, Generate, the young woman is a survival of a trauma in which her parents died together in a car crash when she was about 20 and on the cusp of a serious relationship; another story is about a 14-year-old girl whose parents die of cancer within months of each other and she is sent to Lithuania to live with her grandfather (is this possible?), another is about Jewish orphans in Hamburg on the eve of the Holocaust - not cheery stuff, obviously, but Doerr is more interested in how these characters survive and triumph, less in their suffering - strangely, these are stories of hope. Learning. As noted in earlier posts, Doerr is a realist for the most part (a partial exception is the title story), and he's very interested in a wide variety of topics - almost each story, you can bet, will include some delving into arcana, whether it's neuroscience, fertility, Lithuanian language - he's always pushing the boundaries of what material can fit into a story and what material breaks the seams. Memory. Even if the title of the collection didn't tilt us in this direction, it's obvious that memory and recollection is a topic of deep interest to Doerr, almost an obsession that he works over from story to story: what would it be like to be deprived of our memories? to experience the memories of another person? to be suffering from strokes or Alzheimers and to have your memories called into question of dismissed as figments and visions? Writers need memories the way we all need air and water, but most writers simply delve into their memories to create their fictive worlds - few question the quality and particularities of memory itself the way Doerr does. His stories are not built from his memories (few, if any, seem likely to be autobiographical) but they are about memory itself and how memory imbues the texture of our perceptions and our lives.