Booker Prize winning novelist Julian Barnes on shapeshifting memory. This is why his novel The Sense of an Ending is one of my favourite books.

From The Guardian, Sun 16 Mar 2025 19.00 AEDT

Consider the question of memory. This is often a key factor in changing our mind: we need to forget what we believed before, or at least forget with what passion and certainty we believed it, because we now believe something different that we know to be truer and deeper. Memory, or the weakening or lack of it, helps endorse our new position; it is part of the process. And beyond this, there’s the wider question of how our understanding of memory changes. Mine certainly has over my lifetime. When I was an unreflecting boy, I assumed that memory operated like a left-luggage office. An event in our lives happens, we make some swift, subconscious judgment on the importance of that event, and if it is important enough, we store it in our memory. Later, when we need to recall it, we take the left-luggage ticket along to a department of our brain, which releases the memory back to us – and there it is, as fresh and uncreased as the moment it happened.

But we know it’s not like that really. We know that memory degrades. We have come to understand that every time we take that memory out of the locker and expose it to view, we make some tiny alteration to it. And so the stories we tell most often about our lives are likely to be the least reliable, because we will have subtly amended them in every retelling down the years.

Sometimes it doesn’t take years at all. I have an old friend, a considerable raconteur, who once, in my presence, in the course of a single day, told the same anecdote to three different audiences with three different punchlines. At the third hearing, after the laughter had subsided, I murmured, perhaps a little unkindly, “Wrong ending, Thomas.” He looked at me in disbelief (at my manners); I looked at him in disbelief (at his not being able to stick to a reliable narrative).

I think that sometimes we remember as true things which never even happened in the first place

There is also such a thing as a memory transplant. My wife and I were great friends of the painter Howard Hodgkin, and travelled with him and his partner to many places. In 1989, we were in Taranto in southern Italy, when Howard spotted a black towel in an old-fashioned haberdasher’s window. We went in, Howard asked to see it, and the assistant produced from a drawer a black towel. No, Howard explained, it wasn’t quite the same black as the one in the window. The assistant, unflustered, produced another one, and then another one, each of which Howard rejected as not being as black as the one in the window. After he had turned down seven or eight, I was thinking (as one might), for God’s sake, it’s only a towel, you only need it to dry your face. Then Howard asked the assistant to get the one out of the window, and we all saw at once that it was indeed very, very slightly blacker than all the others. A sale was concluded, and a lesson about the precision of an artist’s eye learned. I described this incident in an essay about Howard, and doubtless told it orally a few times as well. Many years later, after Howard’s death, I was at dinner in painterly circles when a woman, addressing her husband, said, “Do you remember when we went into that shop with Howard for a black towel…” Before she could finish, I reminded her firmly that this was my story, which her expression clearly acknowledged. And I don’t believe she was doing it knowingly: she somehow remembered it as happening to her and her husband. It was an artless borrowing – or a piece of mental cannibalism, if you prefer.

It’s salutary to discover, from time to time, how other people’s memories are often quite different from our own – not just of events, but of what we ourselves were like back then. A few years ago, I had an exchange of correspondence about one of my books with someone whom I’d been at school with, but had not kept up with and had no memory of. The exchange turned into a sharp disagreement, at which point he clearly decided he might as well tell me what he thought of me – or, more accurately, tell me what he remembered now of what he had thought of me back when we were at school together. “I remember you,” he wrote, “as a noisy and irritating presence in the Sixth Form corridor.” This came as a great surprise to me, and I had to laugh, if a little ruefully. My own memory insisted – and still does – that I was a shy, self-conscious and well-behaved boy, though inwardly rebellious. But I couldn’t deny this fellow pupil’s reminiscence; and so, belatedly, I factored it in, and changed my mind about what I must have been like – or, at least, how I might have appeared to others – 50 and more years ago.


Gradually, I have come to change my mind about the very nature of memory itself. For a long time I stuck pretty much with the left-luggage-department theory, presuming that some people’s memories were better because their brain’s storage conditions were better, or they had shaped and lacquered their memories better before depositing them in the first place. Some years ago, I was writing a book that was mainly about death, but also a family memoir. I have one brother – three years older, a philosopher by profession – and emailed him explaining what I was up to. I asked some preliminary questions about our parents – how he judged them as parents, what they had taught us, what he thought their own relationship was like. I added that he himself would inevitably feature in my book. He replied with an initial declaration that astonished me. “By the way,” he wrote, “I don’t mind what you say about me, and if your memory conflicts with mine, go with yours, as it is probably better.” I thought this was not just extremely generous of him, but also very interesting. Though he was only three years older than me, he was assuming the superiority of my memory. I guessed that this could be because he was a philosopher, living in a world of higher and more theoretical ideas; whereas I was a novelist, professionally up to my neck in the scruffy, everyday details of life.

But it was more than this. As he explained to me, he had come to distrust memory as a guide to the past. By itself, unsubstantiated, uncorroborated memory was in his view no better than an act of the imagination. (James Joyce put it the other way round, “Imagination is memory” – which is much more dubious.) My brother gave an example. In 1976 he had gone to a philosophical conference on Stoic logic held at Chantilly, north of Paris, organised by Jacques Brunschwig, whom he had never met before. He took a train from Boulogne, and clearly remembered missing his stop, and having to take a taxi back up the line and arriving late as a consequence. He and Brunschwig became close friends, and 30 years later they were having dinner in Paris and reminiscing about how they first met. Brunschwig remembered how he had waited on the platform at Chantilly and immediately recognised my brother as soon as he stepped down from the train. They stared at one another in disbelief (and perhaps had to apply some Stoic logic to their quandary).


That book came out 17 years ago. And in the meantime, I have come round to my brother’s point of view. I now agree that memory, a single person’s memory, uncorroborated and unsubstantiated by other evidence, is a feeble guide to the past. I think, more strongly than I used to, that we constantly reinvent our lives, retelling them – usually – to our own advantage. I believe that the operation of memory is closer to an act of the imagination than it is to the clean and reliably detailed recuperation of an event in our past. I think that sometimes we remember as true things that never even happened in the first place; that we may grossly embellish an original incident out of all recognition; that we may cannibalise someone else’s memory, and change not just the endings of the stories of our lives, but also their middles and beginnings. I think that memory, over time, changes, and, indeed, changes our mind. That’s what I believe at the moment, anyway. Though in a few years, perhaps I will have changed my mind about it all over again.

This is an edited extract from Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes, published by Notting Hill Editions on 18 March (£8.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com.