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‘Memory Palaces,’ Decorating the Walls,
and Where We Write

Suzy Eynon

I ’m reading the thoughtful novel Landscapes by Christine Lai. The main character, Penelope, catalogs artifacts while taking an inventory of her past alongside that of the place where she lives and works as an archivist while the world falls into a state of ruin. One of the thoughts Penelope ponders is a “memory palace,” a mental reconstruction of a real (or once-real—some of the places are gone, physically) place based on past experiences there. Not all places from a person’s past are memory palaces: some places figure in heavily, like childhood homes, but others might be places one visited only a few times. Penelope recalls places from specific periods of her life more than others, like her father’s home, and a museum she visited multiple times. On recalling these memory palaces, Lai writes, “The art of memory thus involves forming visual placeholders for objects, people, or ideas, and depositing them into an imaginary building erected in the mind.” The character’s memories involve a remembered place which is then decorated with other remembered items, like a stage set in the mind for the purpose of reanimating a memory.

I had a similar thought once, though I used much less elegant words to describe it—I think I called it “imagining rooms” for lack of better explanation. I noticed that when I read or am idly thinking, I will picture specific rooms in homes or buildings, and move about them from memory. My “memory palaces” are my childhood bedroom, my old bedroom in my parents’ home, and, strangely and perhaps unwittingly, the administrative office in a building in downtown Seattle where I worked for 7 years. I realized at some point while spacing out or deep in thought that I was picturing the inside of that office: here is the view next to the tall filing cabinets where I slipped paperwork, here is the view from my first desk just inside the entryway, here is the view as I walked across the department and back to my old manager’s desk. Why would my mind stumble upon and return to this place, and do so during times I’d label myself as relaxed? The details of the shade of the carpet or the placement of desk plants has faded over time, but the architecture of the room is the same. I feel comforted by this memory palace, not agitated as I certainly was during times in real life when I occupied that space as my manager told me we were restructuring or we were advised to keep the miniblinds shut because our coworker didn’t care for natural light.

I’ve noticed rarely appearing memory palaces, too, which I never think of until they pop up as I read. While reading the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, I realized that in my mind, I was picturing my high school gymnasium as the stage for the maze-like world of the book. Why would my mind choose a school gym as the memory palace in which to fill that story? Why is this marble statue suddenly located under what was in reality a basketball hoop? I don’t always use a memory palace from my life as a placeholder for the rooms a character moves about in a book, so I wonder how my mind chooses between using a memory palace, a newly imagined world to decorate with the story as I read, or a combination of these two which is part my memory and part imagined.

During the pandemic, I noticed with a jolt that my repeated trips in and out of the small extra bedroom at home where I worked remotely each day (the disused baby room, if one is to go by the home’s original layout), passing by the light switch on the wall of entry matched in my mind the exact placement of the entry into my childhood bedroom. What is time and location, then, if I am both a child in one city and an adult in this spare bedroom in another, forty years later?

Another time I occupy memory palaces is when I’m writing, more so than while reading. In one of the first writing courses I took, a continuing education fiction workshop, I admitted that most of my stories began with an image, and what I meant was that they begin with my memory of a place which I then expand into a story. This prompted giggles as we weren’t supposed to admit, I don’t think, that we started from a place of “the quality of light against the building was so brilliant, I had to start a story there” or “I recalled overhearing a man say this funny line on the train and I built the story out from that single moment, placing the entire story into that train in my memory.” We were to write an outline of a story before jumping in, to have a sense of character and inciting incident and resolution before we began, and fairly so, as we were beginning writers. I didn’t know how to write a story yet. I only knew how to write about a place or, as my instructor delicately put, I knew how to put up the wallpaper but was doing it prematurely. I was adding in descriptive details before I’d built the foundation. But that is how I’ve always written, from place and memory, reanimating these rooms in my mind with real and imagined characters and situations. To get in the frame of mind to write, I sit physically at my desk or on my couch while my mind navigates memories, and once situated, I write from this space. I’m at my desk but I’m also walking the beach in Oregon, remembering the way the light looked so I can write it into the story. Suddenly, I’m not there, but a character is, and I’m seeing through their eyes. I try to remember to insert the elements of craft so that this, with all its decorations, will become a story. I was thrilled to read Lai’s words, this acknowledgment of “memory palaces” and of the thought process a writer might follow to remember.

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Suzy Eynon is a writer in Washington state. Her work appears in JMWW, Roanoke Review, Passages North, Autofocus, South Dakota Review, and others. She holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University and an MEd in Adult Education from City University of Seattle. She’s currently a volunteer for Pencilhouse and a reader at Five South. She’s working on her first novel. Visit suzyeynon.com and follow @suzyeynon on Twitter.

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