John Green and the importance of remembering

"And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."  -An Abundance of Katherines, John Green

Recently I've started re-listening to many favorites as audiobooks during my commute - most recently one of John Green's first novels, An Abundance of Katherines.  I read this book before I got into oral history as a hobby, and I never realized what importance the concept of memory versus fact-collecting played in the book.

The book's protagonist, Colin Singleton - an utterly unaccomplished wunderkind and Chicago native - finds himself in Gutshot, TN - home to a dying textile mill (and therefore, a quickly dwindling population).  He is tasked, along with his best friend Hassan and the mill owner's daughter, Lindsey, with chronicling the history of current and retired mill employees.  Not until the end of the book (spoiler alert) is it revealed that the reason is that the town and its collective memory may very well soon disappear altogether. 

This revelation causes the almost-adults in the book to start reflecting on their own lives and what they collectively haven't accomplished because of their self-indulgent natures.  Colin's world is shaken when he realizes his own memory, prodigy though he may be, is not as factual as he led himself to believe and that his brain is entirely self-serving.  Ultimately, each character decides to redefine themself:

• by making something of oneself instead of taking the inexcusably lazy road (in Hassan's case);
• by hoping that the world stays the same in order to resist unpleasant growth (in Lindsey's case)
• or in seeking to find meaning in the world outside of that ultimately provable by facts (in Colin's case).

The book's strength lies in explaining the concept of collective memory - especially in dwindling populations.  While facts prove correlation, they are lifeless without an accompanying human story.

Collecting oral histories is not about obtaining recollections of factual events (dates, who won or lost, names, and so on).  It's about documenting the emotions and recollections of experience.