A Response to I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl begins her essay with a vignette was to grab her reader’s attention, then to subvert their assumptions about the piece as a whole. As Hampl states on page 3 of her essay, the vignette “isn’t a story, just a moment, the beginning of what could perhaps become the story” (Hampl 24). This makes an interesting assertion about writing in response to memory. Memory is subject to change. In fact, the simple act of remembering an event changes the details. We are constantly influenced by our impressions and the world around us. She at first sets us in a scene that is so incredibly vivid that we can picture every detail, but she then goes back on her word, saying that instead the details she expressed so clearly in the first passage are in fact altered to be something else. It tells us something about truth and integrity of memory. These details for Hampl were altered because of her perception of events and the way that she wanted the scene to be viewed by her audience, therefore, she created a sort of “myth” (Hampl 26) to the memoir by exaggerating certain details or changing them in order to convey a more accurate feeling of the scene in order to evoke certain emotional responses from the reader.

She then ties this to the idea of the first draft. She compares it to meeting someone for the first time, that sometimes you don’t get all of the details or impressions right straight away. She also brings up the important point that we only store images of value to us, therefore, we can forget what is not relevant to this feeling of value.