the problem with writing

She echoes my thoughts exactly, especially when I'm asked to sum up my childhood. With each repetition, it threatens to become the tale I tell of it, even when I know it was so much more.

There is the writer's Big Problem. Once you write about something, you contain it - making, despite your best efforts, a poor copy, which then threatens to become all there is, to drain the vast pool of memory, which might otherwise at some future time throw up more, new memories. Just as memories of childhood holidays become confine to the Polaroids we have of them.

Anna Funder