Playlists, Venn Diagrams, and Memory

April was my first girlfriend, and my first real love. “April” is a pseudonym, and I have written about her many times before. We’ve kept in touch on and off over the years, and last week, reconnected in a long phone conversation.

(To put the speculation to, um… uh… bed, April lives on the other side of the country, where she is a tenured professor at a renowned university. Distance is only one of many reasons why the resumption of a forty-year-old friendship is not a rekindling of anything.)

In this conversation, we caught up on family stories, expressed sympathies over deaths and divorces — and commiserated about the indignities of what will (impossible, surely) soon be late middle age. We also reminisced, and found, as one often does, that each of us had forgotten certain things.

We each remembered that “our” song was Foreigner’s splendid, treacly “I Want to Know What Love Is.” April and I disagreed about what had been our other favorite songs, so we came up with a project. Each of us would make a Spotify playlist of the 20 songs we remembered as being the primary soundtrack to our seventeen-month relationship. We would then exchange our lists and see the overlap — and debate the discrepancies.

When we swapped, we found that besides the Foreigner ballad, only four other songs had made it on to both playlists. Fifteen out of 20 were different, but as I looked at April’s list and she mine, we conceded that we’d each chosen well.

I share this anecdote not just because it can be a fun exercise to do with a music-loving ex or old friend, but because it reveals a basic truth about shared memories. Memories are like Venn diagrams. For April and me, one circle is what we jointly remembered, one is what I alone recall, and one what she alone remembers. As we recited memories and swapped songs, we were able to move more and more to the larger circle of the jointly remembered. Not always, of course; each of us told at least one story that left the other drawing a complete blank. It was great fun and not entirely easy for a 57 year-old and a 55 year-old to remember themselves at 17 and 15! (I am in the process of figuring out how to merge the playlists, so that we can properly have the “Yours, Mine, Ours” soundtrack of our long-ago romance.)

My clients don’t all know this, but I shall let my readers in on a little secret. Every book I’ve done has a Spotify playlist all its own. I listen to songs that the client likes, or someone in their family likes, or that evoke in me a particular feeling that will be useful as I translate their life into prose. I have playlists that help me concentrate on writing technically difficult accounts of financial transactions, playlists that have helped me write about combat in Afghanistan and 1970s network television — and playlists that help me write raw prose about grief or joy. It is not all high art. But it works. Just as most of us have a playlist or two to get us through a tough workout at the gym, I have specific music to push through me those first or last thousand words due on any given day.

If you’ve ever hired me to write for you, or if we dated for more than two months, you have a playlist. If you ask nicely, I might share it.