The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Who are we? How does story impact our lives?

What makes up an individual? Currently, I am working on Marjorie Prime by Jordan Harrison at American Stage at what is becoming one of my favorite places on earth St. Petersburg, Florida. This complex play is so well written, and so well layered that at every turn of rehearsal we are faced with metaphysical and existential questions.

The story centers around a West Coast family somewhere in the 2050s who has adopted a service that creates holographic projections, or Primes, of late family members. At the beginning of the play, Marjorie, a proud 82 year-old woman, is experiencing dementia.

Like a dream, Marjorie’s entire life is slipping away into eternity. To keep her memory from disappearing entirely her daughter, Tess, and son-in-law, Jon, have downloaded this hologram to look like Marjorie’s late husband Walter.

Each Prime unit has a primary objective: to provide comfort. In order to do this they must become more human, and therefore study the people they are listening to and adopt their mannerisms, speech patterns, and gestures. They “remember” the facts given to them about the character they are portraying combining stories and mannerisms into the idea of a person, and like a director’s dream actor do exactly as they are told.

A key component of this play is the concept of story, or to be more precise, the stories we tell ourselves. Since Marjorie’s memory is slipping, Tess and Jon are trying to discover different stories for her to hold on to. Jon collects Marjorie’s stories in order to give them to the Prime, however, at each turn every person within the play alters a story ever so slightly, a name gets changed, history gets costumed in nostalgia, or a fact gets deleted and thus truth gives way to fiction. Even Marjorie cannot resist the opportunity to remember her life the way she wished it to be.

Memories do not function the way we think they do. There is no data bank, no storage unit in our human brain that houses all our special times.

In an article for The Guardian Dr. Hugh Spiers describes memory as “multitude of tiny modifiable connections between neuronal cells, the information-processing units of the brain. These cells...hang like stars in miniature galaxies and pulse with electrical charge. Thus, your memories are patterns inscribed in the connections between the millions of neurons in your brain.”

Additionally, when we remember something we do not remember the event, but rather, we remember the last time we remembered it. To use an internet meme, our memories are the memory of a memory of a memory. To put it another way, our memories are the stories we remember to tell ourselves.

Yet, this idea is not so foreign to us. Each and every day of our lives we practice the art of storytelling. We create narratives about ourselves, of who we think we are, the values we believe in and then we shade our every day life with the colors of our story. We craft this narrative around our interaction with the world and the way we interpret the millions of moments in our lives adding in bouts of heroism, victimization, defeat, and every other arc we believe fits into our narrative.

  Therefore, our memories are actually a memory of a memory of a memory of a story we told ourself about what happened to us. This is how we learn to believe a lie, or chose to flavor story. We shade an event a certain way, and then the memory of that story becomes fact and is repeated in a loop all of life. As it was put in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Now, imagine you a Prime. Your story is the story that is told to you. You are Walter. You loved Marjorie. You had...one...child. You had...two...dogs, two Toni’s. You proposed to your wife at the movies. Which movie? My Best Friend’s Wedding. No, Casablanca. Depending on what fact you remember, or what story you are told to tell, your “reality” becomes the story.

​Human beings--and in this case A.I.--are storytelling machines. Which story will you tell?