Memory is capricious.

At least mine is. It does not work with clockwork precision, but its errs and digresses constantly.

I can perfectly recall the way I felt when I read a certain book, like this very one, or reconstruct accurately that profound conversation I had on a night in a little lake town in Macedonia. Yet, the order of events in the book, the names of the people I had the conversation with, would escape me, the same as I find it impossible to remember who I saw one week ago, what I ate on Saturday, what I did yesterday… My way of remembering seems to be linked to emotions, rather than to factual information.

By the same token, when asked about a particular instance, say, my first memory or the most embarrassing one, or when required to name specifics—like a preferred author—, my mind goes blank, unable to conjure up anything from the depths of my lifetime recollections. And if I do come up with an answer it may happen too that, if asked again another time, my answers would differ, because they won’t stand some much on consistency as they will on my perception of things at a given moment.

My memory is capricious. It works at will and won’t be forced by anyone. Not even myself. And I have come to respect its rhythms and to accept that this is the way it is; the way I am.

For our way of remembering our stories says more about ourselves than it does about those stories, like Lydia Davis shows in this intimate masterpiece of literature.

We hear a love story through the voice of her protagonist. Everything we know, every detail, is from her own account. We see the lover through her eyes—perfect, beautiful, attentive—and the unfolding of their relationship in her chosen order, because it is in that order that the story gains meaning for her.

In essence, we hear her love story because, were the other party to tell it, we would be hearing a completely different one.

But we are not only being told a story. With all the flashes back and forth, the repetitions and the constant adding and cutting of details, what the reader is actually being given is open access to the very mind of the woman who is compulsively reliving her affair. The affair being over, her being older than her young lover, she cannot help it but question if what happened was worth it or shameful for her as an adult woman. Was the feeling real? Did it happen that way or the other? And so on.

Questions that pester the reader’s mind as the confusion of the protagonist, her agony, is passed onto us. She goes through the same memories over and over again, each time coming up with changed nuances, revised versions, recalling them through a positive or negative light depending on her mood; sometimes joy, others regret, despair or even pity take over.

That’s what it’s like to be a woman, Davis is telling us. Neurotic, insecure, self-doubting, obsessive. All because of a man. She could have avoided all pronouns; a few paragraphs into the novel suffice to reveal the gender of the mind we are inside of, the shape of her memory clearly fitting the mould of romantic, self-destructing love that is regularly incorporated into the woman’s psyche.

Magnificently, The End of the Story pushes us in front of an introspective mirror, and the question arises: how much of a memory is real, and how much is dependent upon our subjectivity? Probably most of it, as, in the process of remembering, we are building up too. A memory is therefore in constant evolution, never static, never, as it shows, to be relied on. And what one remembers as the end of a story, for another might be only the beginning.