The Difference Between Remembering and KnowingAs my novel moves ever closer to publication, I am often asked a question I find difficult to answer: “Are you Hershel?” Hershel is the novel’s first-person protagonist. Like me, he comes of age caught between religious, secular, and queer worlds, where the desire to conform competes with the desire to live authentically. The story is deeply inspired by my own life. But while writing it, I came to understand how inadequate memory can be. When an author writes about something that happened decades ago, memories can easily become “this happened,” and then “that happened.” But a story of the heart, one that makes a reader laugh, cry, or hold their breath, requires more than an accurate chronology. It requires remembering how the experience felt. The emotional truth of a memory is like the halo around a candle flame when you've had too much wine: the edges blur, but somehow the essence becomes more vivid. Throughout the writing process, my beta readers hammered me with the same question: But how did you feel? —How did it feel to be fifteen and desperate to become someone else? —To believe that a new community might finally provide the belonging you had been searching for? —To discover that belonging can come with conditions? For that kind of emotional excavation, I needed outside help: a guide who could lead me through terrain that was simultaneously unfamiliar and deeply my own. And, unexpectedly, I found that guide in Hershel. When I write in the first person, something peculiar happens. I’m not simply deciding what my character should say or do. I feel as if I’m channeling a sentient being who, in exchange for granting them life on the page, becomes my muse. That is how Hershel came into the world. Hershel is an inconvenient writing partner. He has absolutely no respect for my time. He wakes me at three in the morning with an idea about how to tell the story. He interrupts my sleep to tell me, for example, how to express the passage of time. He reminds me of obsessions I had forgotten: the intensity of my first kiss as a teenager, why I fear the color red, or why I become euphoric when sheets on a clothesline billow outward in a gust of wind. He gives me ideas on the subway as it trundles over the Manhattan Bridge while I'm talking with my husband, or in the middle of making a precisely timed stir-fry. The conversation pauses. The stir-fry waits. I write things down. Whatever thought has arrived must be captured before it dissipates. Because sometimes the thing that needs to be remembered isn't a fact. It's a feeling. A detail that seemed insignificant at the time but, decades later, suddenly explains everything. So, when people ask whether I am Hershel, the answer is that he contains pieces of my life, but he is not a transcript of it. He remembers things I had forgotten. He sees connections I couldn't see when I was living them. And once I gave him a voice, he began telling me the secrets of my past. Perhaps most importantly, I've come to realize that this kind of memory exploration is useful even when we aren't writing a novel. Our lives are full of experiences that can easily become simply things that happened. We move on to the next thing, and then the next. But if we never stop to ask why something affected us, why we keep choosing or rejecting something, and what it revealed about our desires and fears, we may miss the meaning our lives are offering us. Sometimes, remembering isn't about recovering the facts. It's about recovering why they mattered. In future newsletters, I'll be exploring some of what this process has taught me about faith, identity, reinvention, and the price of belonging. If you'd like to follow along as In the Dark, All Cats Are Gray moves toward publication, follow me on Instagram and Facebook, and visit LanceTukell.com for updates, excerpts, and more.
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