Panning For Gold in Memoir and Memory

What to Keep & What to Leave Out

The other day, a Leonard Cohen song came on and I was suddenly transported back seventeen years to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, watching the legendary singer perform. Sitting next to a boyfriend who cared about me so much that he had organized an entire trip around this concert because he knew how much I loved Leonard Cohen.

After the show, he turned to me and said, “I’m glad to see how much this moved you.”

But the truth was—I wasn’t moved. Not how I had wanted to be. Just like I wasn’t moved by him in the way I wanted to be.

It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t… enough.
Not the concert. Not the relationship.

And yet, here I am nearly two decades later, still holding onto that memory. Still replaying scenes from it. And when I watch this video, I AM moved. That’s the thing about memory.

It changes over time. Our brains can’t hold onto everything. The everyday bits—brushing teeth, answering emails, figuring out dinner—fall through the sieve. What we keep are the larger moments. The ones that shimmer with beauty or ache with meaning. Like panning for gold, we sift and shake, and most of life washes away.

We’re left with what glitters or what haunts us.

Gold & Ghosts

With that trip, I’ve kept both kinds of memories, but have forgotten much of the day-to-day reality of those times.

I remember the fire we built together (in the rain). The surreal beauty of the Garden of the Gods (and the deep exhaustion after our hike). The picturesque river beside our nearly perfect campsite (that sounded like a freight train when we tried to sleep). The moments of profound happiness (and the strange ache I couldn’t name that followed me through it all).

All of these contrasting details sit side by side and could tell two very different versions of the same story, depending on which I include.

We shape our past into something readable, something meaningful. Leaving out the parts that don’t fit neatly into our narrative. We know it’s incomplete—how could it not be? The best we can do is hold what shimmers, and keep in mind that what glitters for us may not for everyone else.

What Remains

As memoirists, a big part of our job is to decide what stays in the pan. What to keep, what to leave out. And while we understand we must tell the truth, we rarely talk about how much truth is too much. Or what kind of truth serves the story.

Every scene we choose to include is an answer to that question: So what? Why does this moment matter? What does it reveal about who we were, what we were learning, or how we were changing?

There’s a temptation, especially early in a project, to include everything. And that’s fine if you don’t mind writing indefinitely (like I have). But the finished memoir isn’t a transcript of your life. It’s a curated selection of memories.

Sometimes the gold is obvious: a heartbreak, a revelation, a choice that changed everything. Other times, it’s more subtle: a conversation we can’t stop replaying, a pattern or symbol that keeps emerging again and again, or something that didn’t move you until years later.

One of my memoirists said that he writes ONE sentence to summarize the essence of each chapter he wants to write to help him determine if it belongs or not.

When it’s not clear, I ask myself:

• Does this moment move the emotional arc forward?

• Have I already expressed this elsewhere in a similar way?

• Does this moment reveal a universal truth, or am I just sharing it because it happened?

• And of course: “So what?”

If I can’t answer these questions, it doesn’t necessarily mean the memory has no place. Maybe it just means I may need to pan a little longer. (I have a whole folder of stories titled “For my next book.”) Sometimes the sifting, of choosing what to hold and what to let go, is simply a way to understand our lives—the past, present, and future.

Questions For You

• How do you decide what makes a moment “worthy” of the page?

• What have you discovered in your own sifting — about what stays, and why?

• Do you prefer to focus only on the stories you know belong in your book, or do you allow yourself to write the ones that will never make the cutting pass?