Abstract
My interdisciplinary, practice-based Creative Writing thesis comprises two components. The
first is the creative component, my novel, Over You. This is the story of Emily, an artist
haunted by her past who tries to transcend childhood trauma through painting and who, in
later life, questions whether taking a memory erasure pill might have been a better option.
The second component is the self-reflexive critical commentary. The discussion in this
commentary encompasses historic thinking about memory, memory formation, traumatic
memory and current developments in pharmaceutical memory erasure.
My interdisciplinary research is underpinned by the question of whether remembering or
forgetting enables a wounded psyche to move away from trauma and it has a creative
application. My consideration of synaptic plasticity in memory formation and storage served
as an early creative objective: to see if the way the brain remembers could be used to help me
write prose in which words fired off each other like neurons to form fresh images and
meanings. The formal experimentation that followed gave way to the novel’s narrative style
and to the value I attribute to the creative process in this thesis. Furthermore, new findings
into forgetting as an obstacle to recovery from trauma, and the fact that memory erasure pills
are currently in development by a US pharmaceutical company, are embedded in my novel,
raising timely questions about the relationship between memory and identity, and about the
ethics of forgetting.
My research into memory sits in dynamic relation to four books about memory that have
informed my creative practice. These include one autobiography and three works of fiction:
Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, first published in Great
Britain in 1967; Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1, The Way by Swann’s, first
published in 1913; Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982); and Edward St Aubyn’s
quintet, the Melrose novels (published individually between 1992 and 2012). All these works
have been chosen for their treatment of the remembering mind.