An encounter I had with the late chef and food critic Anthony Bourdain never happened. False memory, sorry. At the time we supposedly shared small talk and a pitcher of beer, I was working in Provincetown, Massachusetts as a pantry chef (a pretentious title because I had no kitchen experience) in an upscale restaurant. But years later when Bourdain died, I read and reread the dates he lived and worked on Cape Cod and realized I must have encountered someone who looked like him but was irrefutably not him. Come to think, many people I bumped into on the Cape during that hippie era looked like the youngish Bourdain, shaggy-coiffed and rail thin, another kitchen worker in seasonal restaurants catering to mobs of wealthy tourists coming from Philly or New York City. As it happened, Anthony didn’t arrive in P-Town until a several summers after I had left the Cape. In plain terms, I had invented a false memory. Innocently, I thought I had met him, and after repeating the tale, I started to believe it. Truth is I never met Anthony Bourdain. I shared small talk and a nod in passing with someone who looked like him. Never shared a pitcher of beer with him. Never greeted him as we passed each other on the street. Never met the guy. Wish I had.
“NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams infamously recalled being in a helicopter that took fire during the Iraq war. It was soon learned that the version of the story he told on national news was a false memory. In fact, his helicopter was miles from the chopper that had sustained damage. A distortion of memory prompted Mr. Williams to conflate his story. He didn’t lie. He believed the tale he told. Nevertheless, his career took a downward dive for incorrectly relating his experience.
False memories are common, for I’m sure most folks believe they lived through an event or encounter they decorated with imaginative details. They were not being dishonest, simply narrating with embellishment. In some cases, people cannot make a distinction between memory and imagination, their stories growing in falseness with each retelling. They are not being dishonest. Not exactly.
For instance, my first memory, I often say, is the moment a large earthquake struck the Seattle area (especially the Olympia vicinity and Thurston County) in 1949. I remember being picked me up and carried down wobbling stairs, shocking instability. The memory is fractured—excitement, panic, a dramatic flight down porch steps to the grass of the backyard. My first memory, except it is probably the invention that I picked up from others who told the story of that disaster and of my mother whisking me up and hurrying down the back porch and away from a shaking house. I’m told it is unlikely (but possible) a two-year-old would have such a vivid memory. Evidently, false memories are common when recounting intense and emotional events.
As it happens, it is easy to misremember. One may be reliable and trustworthy but inaccurate. Those stories embedded in memory may explain why eyewitness testimony in trials is often doubted by attorneys in forensic cases. Gaslighting may come into play when one’s view of what happened comes into question by another. If a false narration is repeated and conflated, a person may soon be convinced the reiterated story is true, or what was once true is now false. According to psychology research, identity narratives evolve from the stories we experience and those that we hear from others.
So, alas, I never met Anthony Bourdain, and I probably heard stories about the 1949 earthquake, which I turned into a vivid memory. I confess. So now I will relate each of those false narratives for what they are: personal yarns.
Now let me tell you about the sixty-pound salmon I caught last year on the Yukon River. It all started when the engine on our float plane started to sputter….