My brother has a sharply detailed memory of falling off the stage at the rec hall at summer camp when he was seven: how he couldn’t stop crying, how the counselor sent another boy over to the girls’ camp to get me, how I ran in, panting and sweaty and sat down on the wooden floor with him on my lap and hugged him and rocked him until he stopped crying.

It was an extraordinarily important moment for him, he told me recently.  He was scared that summer.  It was his first summer at sleep-away camp, eight weeks away from Mom and Dad living in a cabin with strangers. He had been homesick and lonely.  But that day when he fell and I came running was, he said, a turning point for him.  Realizing that his big sister was just a shout away made all the difference. I was 15 that summer, and I remember those eight weeks at Camp Tamarac with crystal clarity.  It was the summer I won the Taconic Invitational Girls Tennis Tournament.  It was the summer that the boy I had a crush on for the previous two summers finally paid attention to me.  We kissed a lot that summer.  He gave me his ring, which I wore on a chain around my neck.  It was silver and had a large onyx stone.   A few weeks later, he broke up with me.  I remember the heather blue crewneck sweater I wore to the dance the night he dumped me.  I remember the song that was playing.  I remember he smelled of Canoe cologne.  Although that summer happened more than three decades ago, I still remember the names of every girl in my cabin.  I could draw you a schematic of the cabin, which girls slept in which cots. 

But I don’t remember comforting my brother in the rec hall.  Truth be told, I don’t remember my brother even being at summer camp that year.  I have no memory of him whatsoever.  He is part of no incident, no scene, no conversation I can remember from that summer. 

Did this incident happen?  My brother is sure it did.  Me?  I just don’t know. Whose version of the past is the right one?  If you were interviewing my brother and me, what story would you write about that summer?

Let me tell you another story about memory, fact and truth.

My husband, a science writer, wrote a biography of Linus Pauling, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.  During the course of the research, my husband interviewed Pauling many times.  The man had a prodigious memory, the kind of memory you would expect a genius scientist to have.  He was at the end of his life then.  He was in his 90s, but time and time again what Pauling told my husband was corroborated by other people, by letters and papers and documents, by the work of other historians.  His recall was amazing.

One of the anecdotes Linus Pauling told my husband was this:

When Linus was about 7 years old, he and his cousin were caught by a workman while exploring a half-finished building.  This was in Condon, Oregon.  Linus tried to wiggle out the window, but the workman caught him by his pants, dragged him back inside and beat him with a piece of lath.  Linus ran home sobbing.  He tearfully told his story to his father, Herman, who listened carefully, then led his son by the hand through the streets of Condon in search of the workman.  They found the fellow, Pauling remembered, eating lunch in the crowded dining room of the town’s biggest hotel.  Herman asked him if he had beaten his son.  When the man answered yes, Linus recalled, Herman knocked the fellow to the floor – and was subsequently arrested and tried for assault.

Pauling’s recollection was just the kind of a juicy anecdote the narrative writer salivates over. It was vivid and specific and meaningful.  It was also … wrong.  When my husband checked the police records to get additional details about the incident, he discovered that Pauling’s father was, indeed arrested and put on trial in Condon during the year that Linus was seven.  But he was arrested and tried not for assault – there was no record at all about the assault – but for bootlegging whiskey during a time of local prohibition. (He was acquitted.)