Like other objects remembered from childhood, a book is alive, absolute, vague and partial. Dreamlike, memory reassembles (and resembles) the past, a scene or a moment, and always in pieces: a sound, smell, colour, shape. The script I write and cast as Memory is almost intangible and unfailingly incomplete. I turn and look at my bookshelves. There’s a snapshot of my mother, my sister and me; I’m the infant in the baby carriage. The script I write and cast as Memory is almost intangible and unfailingly incomplete. I turn and look at my bookshelves. There’s a snapshot of my mother, my sister and me; I’m the infant in the baby carriage. I keep a memory: I’m little, with my mother, walking over a footbridge; there’s another woman and a baby carriage. Something disturbing happens. My mother doesn’t remember the scene. She thinks I dreamed it. Is the picture what I remember?

When I was about five I read a seemingly simple tale that was impossible for me to grasp. A little girl has a blanket. The blanket gets a hole. The little girl wants to get rid of the hole so she cuts it out. The hole gets bigger, and she cuts that out. She cuts and cuts and finally the blanket disappears.

I read the story over and again, as if it might change, and at its new end explanation would erupt from its pages. But the story’s dire conclusion — the blanket disappears — left me trying to understand why it made sense and didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t she cut out the hole?(1)The mysterious effect of reading, the immense undecidability of meaning, all this was contained in a book whose title, author and illustrator I cant’t remember. And no one’s ever heard of it. The book is like a memory whose status as an object is in question.

But I remember reading it on my bed, and on the floor of the bedroom I shared with one of my sisters, and sitting in a big chair, in a room whose walls were papered brown, with little blue and yellow flowers. I didn’t like brown. Was the radio on? Was I aware of girls and holes? What am I making up?

Years later I wrote a novel in which a character reads the blanket story. (2)By incorporating the lost book into ‘my’ book I found a way to restore it to some kind of existence outside, and yet within, ‘me’. Now as I write about it again the blanket story gains significance and structure, becomes a private myth in my scripted childhood, overwhelming everything else, much as the hole consumed the blanket.