Do we remember what happened in our past, or do we construct a fiction out of fragments? Can we trust our memories to be accurate and truthful? Scholar and writer Siri Hustvedt talks about truth and memory and the value of imagination in tying them together.

What we think happened in the past, even just a few moments in the past, and what actually happened are often different things. Varying eyewitness accounts reveal that people see and recall the same events quite differently.

A young writer’s account of her first years in New York City is found 4 decades later by her older self. What the older self remembers and what the younger self recounted become a dialogue between the two and an exploration of memory, time and imagination in writer and scholar Siri Hustvedt’s newest novel, Memories of the Future.

As well as writing poetry, novels, and essays, the Minnesota born Hustvedt has published a number of peer-reviewed scholarly papers on psychoanalysis and neuroscience. She is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York teaching a seminar on Narrative Psychiatry.

Siri Hustvedt will be at in Seattle for Town Hall in conversation with journalist Lauren Du Graf.

They talk Monday, March 25, 2019, 7:30 PM at Seattle First Baptist Church on First Hill.

If you like this podcast, check out “In The Moment” from Town Hall. Jini Palmer and I present excerpts from my interviews and interviews by other journalists conducted with guests to Town Hall. And if you are interested in listening to the lectures themselves, find them on the Town Hall website or wherever you find your podcasts.