Abstract
Adolescence is supposed to be a time to remember. Guidance given in a nineteenth-century moral manual, Advice to Teens, was to live life to the full for ‘the loss of time is irretrievable’,1 and throughout the twentieth century diaries were popular as aides-mémoires for this crucial period of development.2 Add current youth practices of ‘capturing the moment’ for posterity on Facebook or Instagram and it is easy to conclude that the teenage years really are the ‘best years of one’s life’ and not to be forgotten. Psychologists researching autobiographical memory across the life span offer support for the importance of creating memories in youth, identifying a ‘reminiscence bump’ indicating that a high proportion of memories recollected in older age are of events that happen between the ages of 15 and 25 (Rubin et al. 1986). Similarly, studying published autobiographies has demonstrated that the epiphanies or autobiographical ‘turns’ so fundamental to the structure of modern memoirs tend to be formed around events established in the memory in mid to late teenagehood (Sturrock 1993).
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Notes
Isaac Taylor, Advice to Teens, or Practical Help Toward the Formation of One’s Own Character (London: Fenner, 1818), 11.
See for example: Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999)
Roberta Seelinger Trites, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000)
Alison Waller, Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (London: Routledge, 2009).
Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. and ed. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 115.
Margaret Mahy, Memory (London: Collins Flamingo, 2002), 78.
For an account of how memory performance in older adults might be affected by perception of negative stereotypes, see S. J. Barber and M. Mather, ‘Stereotype Threat in Older Adults: When and Why Does It Occur, and Who Is Most Affected?’ in The Oxford Handbook of Emotion, Social Cognition, and Everyday Problem Solving During Adulthood, ed. P. Verhaeghen and C. Hertzog (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 302–320.
Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox (London: Walker Books, 2010), 14.
The phenomenon is discussed by Charles Fernyhough in Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory (London: Profile Books, 2012), 165–166.
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© 2016 Alison Waller
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Waller, A. (2016). Amnesia in Young Adult Fiction. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_35
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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