The stories we keep… and not only on Thursdays

There are books I enjoy because they are fun, books I admire because they astound me in their originality and then there are books that quietly rearrange the furniture in my mind and that I just don’t want to end. “What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan did that for me.

I picked it up through the Thursday Next Book Club, started by my friend Colin Ford, and in many ways that feels fitting. This is a book about memory, interpretation, friendship and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And to/about others. It is also a reminder that reading itself is one of the great communal acts, even when done alone. And one we must not lose.

The Thursday Next Book Club has become an important part of my life. We meet monthly, on the second Thursday of each month, and when life allows most of us attend as we all share the importance of the gathering. It is the first and only book club I have ever belonged to despite books having shaped much of my life for decades. The format is wonderfully simple. One person hosts. There is dinner. There is drinking. There are conversations that drift from literature to politics to travel to ageing to absurdity and back again. Lots of laughter. People speak about what they have read. Sometimes somebody has devoured six books. Sometimes somebody has read none because work, children, grief, exhaustion or life got in the way.

And nobody minds.

That, perhaps, is part of the beauty of it.

The group itself is eclectic and thoughtful and deeply interesting. My love and inspiration for each of the members runs deep. A few now live overseas (Prague and Mauritius) but still rejoin when they are back in South Africa. There are overlapping tastes but also wildly divergent ones (I still cannot fathom how my amazing friends can read series of fantasy that encompass dozens of books!) Occasionally a book emerges that almost everyone has loved and that in itself becomes fascinating. Why this one? Why now? What did we all find in it?

McEwan’s book was Colin’s recommendation to me (we also share a love of Murakami) and I am deeply grateful for it.

McEwan has long been, for me, one of those writers whose intelligence never feels performative. He writes with clarity but also with density. His novels demand attention. The last of his books I read (around 2022) called “Lessons” was enormous in scale and ambition. And superbly challenging. This one is smaller physically but in some ways bigger philosophically. It lingers, even more.

Towards the end comes the line: “Memory is purposefully selective.”

That sentence stayed with me long after I closed the book.

Because memory is selective. Brutally so. We remember what protects us. We remember what flatters us. We remember what wounds us. We edit continuously. Even autobiography is fiction to some extent. Biography certainly. History perhaps most of all.

Who gets to tell the story matters. “His” story often hardens into history, lessening “her” and “their” stories. To the victor the spoils of what gets remembered and celebrated. Partly why some “leaders” like statues of themselves and their names on everything imaginable. Hoping that this will trump truth.

Whose version becomes accepted as truth matters, deeply.

Much of the novel is set around a century into the future and then returns to the present day. McEwan imagines a world shaped by climate collapse, geopolitical conflict and the consequences of decisions already set in motion now. The shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, hangs over the narrative. So too does environmental decline (in a century, people live on many islands owing to rising sea levels) and scientific advancement. Reading it felt less like science fiction and more like an extended thought experiment about inevitability.

What struck me most, though, was not the futurism but the instability of certainty.

Three decades ago, during my Masters thesis on Harold Pinter and his screenplays, I focused on the idea of “revealing the real”. Or perhaps more accurately, the impossibility of ever fully doing so. Pinter understood that reality is fractured. Two people can experience the same event and carry entirely different truths from it. Life is not black and white. It is layered and contradictory and often deeply unreliable.

There is not one reality. There are many realities and memory sits at the centre of that.

I have kept a journal for about twenty years now. Nothing elaborate. Usually just a line or two at night. The best thing of the day. Sometimes the worst thing. Occasionally something absurd or funny or painful. Just enough to acknowledge that the day existed.

Because days disappear quickly.

Too quickly.

One of my many flaws is that I move on rapidly. I seldom dwell in the past. Reflection does not come naturally to me as I tend to push forward. There is something healthy in that perhaps, but also something lost. I know I need to pause more often to properly absorb moments while they are happening. To notice the texture of ordinary life before it becomes memory.

The journals help. Or at least I hope they will.

The novel also grapples with ageing, with Alzheimer’s disease and the terror of cognitive decline. That landed hard with me. More than physical frailty, more than death itself even, the idea of losing my mind frightens me profoundly. Memory and thought and language feel central to who I am. Reading, writing, conversation, curiosity, these are not hobbies to me. They are identity.

So what happens when memory begins to fail?

What remains when recollection dissolves?

And what even is “the self” if the stories we tell ourselves can no longer be accessed?

Medical science will undoubtedly evolve. Perhaps dramatically. Maybe one day Alzheimer’s will become manageable or preventable or reversible. Maybe memory itself will become technologically assisted. Perhaps future generations will archive themselves so comprehensively that forgetting becomes impossible. I loved the novel’s take on using our social media in a hundred years to explore what we were like. To understand us better.

The book had me ask: would total memory even be desirable? Do I really want to remember everything? Can we, ever?

Perhaps forgetting is not always failure. Sometimes it is mercy. Sometimes it is survival.

Reading this novel reminded me again why books matter so much. Not because they provide answers but because they sharpen questions. Good books expand uncertainty rather than reduce it. They force us to reconsider what we think we know about ourselves and others.

And perhaps that is what Colin’s Thursday Next Book Club really celebrates and gives us.

Not books alone. But attention. Making time. Showing up. Listening to different interpretations. Allowing disagreement. Sharing enthusiasm. Remaining curious. In a world increasingly obsessed with certainty and speed and algorithmic reinforcement, there is something quietly radical about a group of people gathering around a dinner table once a month simply to talk about ideas and stories. About books. Glorious books.

Memory is purposefully selective.

Maybe reading helps us select better.

Here’s to making many more memories, Thursday Next Book Club. Thank you.