I Remember

One of the pleasures of writing here is that you don’t need a bold new insight or novel argument to justify posting about a book: you can simply share something you’ve read and loved—or that you happen to remember.

It is, therefore, appropriate that a post listing works of unconventional nonfiction led me—through the generosity of readers—to a work of unconventional memoir built from individual reports of memory with little to no analysis or connective tissue.

From 1970 to 1973, the artist-poet Joe Brainard published three miniature books, each of which consists of nothing but isolated single paragraphs, in sequence. In 1975, they were compiled into one volume, I Remember.

According to a recent essay in the New Yorker:

Considered his masterpiece, the book is exactly what one expects: an extended flow of brief recollections, all beginning with that incantatory phrase “I remember.”

Not to be obnoxious, but this is the polar opposite of critical insight. The last thing one expects in a memoir, whatever the title, is a total lack of analytical or narrative structure, relentless unprogressive iteration. It’s as if the critic can’t remember not having read the book, which was exalted for defying expectations. Paul Auster called it “one of the few totally original books I have ever read”; for Edmund White, it was a “completely original book.”

Chastened by the risks of criticism, I resort to reproduction. Here is how the collected I Remember starts:

I remember the first time I got a letter that said “After Five Days Return To” on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed to return it to the sender.

I remember the kick I used to get going through my parents’ drawers looking for rubbers. (Peacock.)

I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.

You will gather from this: Brainard can be funny, playful, serious; and his mind will drift. Among the more sober topics are sexual repression and racial prejudice in the 1950s, about which Brainard makes frank confessions. Among the playful moments:

I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the Boston Public Library, but soon losing interest.

And a joke that anticipates Mitch Hedberg:

I remember when I wanted to be rich and famous. (And I still do!)

At times, Brainard toys with his own form:

I remember that I can never remember how bathroom doors in buses open.

One notices, first, the superficial paradox; then the fact that memory this time is not episodic but propositional, the way you remember where you were born. For Brainard, that means Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1942, and a lot of his memories stem from childhood.

I remember many first days of school. And that empty feeling.

I remember the clock from three to three-thirty.

At times, Brainard merges his perspective with a parent, teacher, or friend, in free indirect style:

I remember that entering the classroom just as the bell rings is not the same as being in your seat when the bell rings.

There are dreams and daydreams, sexual fantasies, nostalgia for candy and clothes. But what does it all add up to? What is implicit in I Remember, when we read between the lines?

Joe Brainard, Untitled (Toothbrushes), 1973-74

Louis Bury’s Exercises in Criticism is a collection of essays on avant-garde prose that adopts a rule of mimesis: each essay follows a version of the form of the work it explicates. In writing about Brainard, Bury leaves the refrain, “I remember,” unexpressed, to disorienting effect:

Ron Padgett’s remark, in the book’s afterword, that “I remember…” is one of the few literary forms that even non-literary people can use.”

wondering what constitutes a “non-literary” person.

wondering if any person, literary or not, could write a version of the book as compelling as Brainard’s.

Here Bury’s mimetic approach is doubly apt, since Brainard’s book inspires imitation. It’s hard not to reverberate with Brainard’s memories, which prompt memories of one’s own

I remember continuing my return address on envelopes to include “The Earth” and “The Universe.”

I remember rocks you pick up outside that, once inside, you wonder why.

Me too! Reading Brainard, one remembers to remember, recollecting that one has memories, too. If that seems too “meta” consider this paragraph from the second page of I Remember:

I remember one of the first things I remember. An ice box. (As opposed to a refrigerator.)

Not that everything in the book is resonant. Brainard recounts more sexual awakenings than seems feasible or, frankly, desirable to me. But like many readers, Brainard’s studied informality gives me the sense that I, or anyone, could write an essay like his.

Brainard was conscious of the “everyman” character of his work. He wrote, in a letter:

I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can.

His own inspiration was Gertrude Stein, whom he was reading “on the toilet” while writing his first volume: “I still find her very difficult and I was thinking how great it would be to hear Gertrude Stein out loud.”

In one of the most beautiful iterations of I Remember, the film-maker Matt Wolf allows us to hear Brainard himself out loud, reading passages from his book to footage from the 1950s and 1960s, with a voiceover by Brainard’s lifelong friend, Ron Padgett. The narration is fragmentary but chronological, from their childhood in Tulsa to Brainard’s coming out in 1963, his retreat from artistic production in the 1980s, and his death of AIDS in 1994.

Bury’s best insight is about the function of Brainard’s form:

[I remember] finally understanding “I remember” as a rhetorical consecration: this, the following, matters, somehow, to me, perhaps, even, to you.

This is part of its appeal to readers—its entreaty, almost—and, I think, of its attraction to would-be writers. It’s not just that, in reading I Remember, I’m invited to revisit my own memories, but that I’m invited to see them as worth remembering.

But there is ambiguity here. For Bury, what matters is the content of memory, the facts that follow “I remember.” That is often true: even minor details count. At other times, I wonder if what matters is the fact that I remember—a relationship with the past of which one is reminded, explicitly, over a thousand times in Brainard’s book. “Do I remember this because it matters? Or does it matter because I remember it?”—questions lost in Bury’s critical elision of the phrase.

BONUS CONTENT: Deborah Solomon on “Joe Brainard: A Box of Hearts and Other Works,” his 2022 retrospective at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.