The present of the past: dialogues with memory over time

This study analyzes the self-constructing meanings of an autobiographical episode in the life of one woman told at repeated intervals over 35 years. It demonstrates the ways in which the present constructs the past and shows how autobiographical memory may be used dialogically to create and contrast with current self-constructions, to disavow intolerable aspects of self, and to preserve disused but valued self-representations. Memories, in this sense, operate as texts whose meaning changes as the dialogue within self changes. The meanings of past memories, rather than their contents, are reshaped to hold aspects of a layered, multiple self.