ABSTRACT
Canetti, the 1981 Nobel Prize winner for literature (Canetti 1979). Deeply per-
sonal and idiosyncratic, this kind of memory fragment has a lot to tell us about how
people recall their lives. We have learned a great deal in the past 20 years about
how and why people remember their past. In at least some of this work, psycholo-
gists have tried to trace the developmental pathways that connect young children’s
casual and conversational recollections of their experience to the finely crafted,
sometimes searing memories recounted in authors’ autobiographies. So what
causes many people to tell stories about their past when they are little? How does
the process emerge, and what individual and cultural forces determine people’s
proclivity and ability to recollect their past as they get older? Why do some people
(e.g., Elias Cannetti) seem to retain or rediscover vivid forms of autobiographical
narrative, whereas so many, at least in this culture, lose whatever narrative sparkle
they had? And what difference, if any, might this sparkle make in the life experi-
ence of an ordinary adult?
