It felt like the punchline: to see now, so clearly, the way he had turned the people in his life into characters. He’d picked the narrative, then fit people, in his experience of them, to reinforce it. What if you don’t do that anymore? he thought.

That elemental sense of brokenness, of being wrong, of being bad—it all lived right here in this room, like a filing cabinet, where Sam compiled the experiences that proved there was something wrong with him. All of the memories associated with the reinforcement of this belief were stored in this place. It was an evidence room.

It’s not about what you remember. It’s about why you remember it that way.

grinning at the pleasure of having found one another, at the stupid and endlessly affirming joy of being in love.

The very act of telling the story was not like photography; he didn’t know how to capture moments as they were. It was more like sculpture, starting from the raw materials of lived experience and chiseling away at it until it had revealed what he wanted to see, or what he thought the world wanted to see.

“I guess I just always thought that people are the way we are,” he said. “Like, we grow and evolve, to a certain extent, and maybe our behavior changes, but so much of what makes us ourselves is innate, or intractable. But what if the bad stuff is like a parasite? What if it’s something you can actually isolate and remove, like—I don’t know,

This was the thing that he knew now, that he had never quite understood before: the way memory could be both the lock and the key, how easily it kept him in the bondage of old stories he didn’t need anymore, and how easily, too, it could show him everything he needed to know about who he was.

For so long all the things that happened to me were just these—these different parts, this jumble of disconnected incidents that didn’t mean anything on their own. And now it feels like all those bones took shape and became a skeleton. Something assembled. It became a whole body.”

it’s not about what you remember—it’s about why you remember it that way.