Brianna Labuskes on Reckoning and Using Memory as a Tool in Crime Fiction

People like to think of memory as a video, something they can pull out and watch and then put carefully back into its case for future viewings. But memory is malleable, fallible. Half the time it doesn’t even come close to what really happened, even if we’ve convinced ourselves it’s accurate.

That’s because memory isn’t a video; it’s a tool. Our brain uses it to understand—and survive—our current environment. Our brain isn’t loyal to the past; it’s loyal to the body carrying it around, and if believing a false narrative is what’s going to help that body thrive and prosper, that’s what the brain is going to do.

We don’t usually create these false narratives on purpose, of course. A memory can be altered in plenty of innocuous ways, just like how a fingerprint smudge or a scratch on a DVD can make the thing skip a scene. We make quick edits here and there without realizing we’re doing it, because the way we feel now influences how we remember events that happened then. (For example: did you really fall in love at first sight, or do you just have butterflies now when you think of seeing your partner?)

It’s like putting a filter on a photograph to make the colors pop and thinking it was that way all along. Because of that, the memories we “watch” the most are the ones that become the most “corrupted” from the original version.

Scientists have proven this time and again: our memories aren’t so much memories as they are memories of memories. And then memories of those memories of memories.

Three thousand Americans were asked to write down where they were when they got news of 9/11. They were quizzed on it years later, and a whopping forty percent got the details completely wrong, despite the cliched refrain, “I’ll never forget where I was when it happened.” What was interesting was that the participants had created narratives for themselves, ones they’d maintained and cultivated over the years to tell a compelling story that in the end was completely false.

And they had no idea they had done it.

So, knowing how incredibly fallible memory can be, it’s almost terrifying that it plays such a large part in solving crimes in the real world. But it is exhilarating, as a reader, that crime novelists are more and more taking advantage of the fertile ground it can offer for conflict and tension.

For some authors, the question to ask is: whose memory matters in the moral battleground that is the past? We see that explored in books like Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove, and The Bone Thief by Vanessa Lille, both about missing indigenous girls and women. Or All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby and When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole, books whose settings are deeply influenced by race and those who think their memories of that place are the right ones without realizing they’re coming from a place of bigotry or privilege.

For others, the tension comes when a character’s memory doesn’t seem to exist at all. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins utilized the black-out drunk trope so well that it inspired dozens of other books that would henceforth be labeled as the next Girl on the Train. The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager also tackles the trope, while others, like Tana French’s In the Woods, explore the way memory can be affected by (non-alcoholic) trauma. And Wendy Walker’s All is Not Forgotten is an incredibly compelling story about a woman who takes a drug to medically erase her memories—and the inevitable fall out that creates.

And yet still, for others, memory can be a strong magnetic force on the course of the investigation—something that doesn’t simply flesh out a character’s resume, but creates layers of complications with the current crime itself. This is done well in God of the Woods by Liz Moore, but to say anything more would be spoiling it.

What I can talk about without spoilers is how I handle memory in Clean Slate, my new novel, part psychological-thriller, part-procedural featuring a crime scene cleaner with a traumatic past.

The thing is, memories haven’t always been kind to Olive Hunt. She was raised by a mother who had severe, untreated contamination OCD. Whitney Hunt never raised a hand to Olive, because she never wanted to hurt her, but she did things that would be considered abuse in order to “protect” her.

That is why it’s both shocking and isn’t that Olive comes home one day from school to find her father dead on the floor, her mother standing over him explaining to the detectives that she very helpfully cleaned up the blood. Olive wants to erase the memory as if it’s dirt she could scrub off the floor—something she’s been doing since she was old enough to hold a rag. But there’s a fear that she can’t shake.

Olive Hunt is worried, more than anything else, that she might become her mother.

That’s why her friends and family don’t understand when she starts her own crime scene cleaning business. Not only is she forced to remember the worst day in her life every time she encounters a violent crime scene—which happens multiple times a week—she has to do it while cleaning, a muscle memory so ingrained she can’t remember ever not having it.

Cleaning isn’t scary to Olive, though. Every day she does things, like cleaning up vomit from the back of cop cars or fecal matter in motel rooms, that her mother would have died before doing.

It’s when Olive gets drawn into the investigation of a serial killer against her will, that she has to grapple with the fact that she’s been hiding from her memories more than she realized. Because while the cleaning feels safe, noticing details that seemingly no one else can see? That is her mother all the way. Every clue that she finds that the police and ME and crime scene techs missed is because her mother taught her how to look for them. Every detail she picks up from a suspect’s house or the scene of the crime is because of her childhood.

So, the question I wanted to ask became: what happens when a character’s memory is full of knives ready to slice them up with one wrong move just when they need it the most?

But there’s no other choice than to face them head on. To keep herself and her loved ones safe, Olive has to reckon with the memories that made her into who she is today.

Memory is a tool, after all.

And, more and more, crime authors are picking it up and using it.

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