The Memory Palace: True Stories of the Past by Nate DiMeo

Well, the bad news is that I'm sick and I've been in bed for days. The good news is that I was able to read a lot and now I feel well enough to sit upright and type, so get ready for some book reviews!

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I've written so many times about the podcast The Memory Palace on this blog. I have called the host, Nate DiMeo, a national treasure, refreshing and energizing, a haunting writer, an unimpeachable writer, silver-tongued, brilliant, and a genius. I'm basically DiMeo's number one fangirl. His podcast is filled with ten- to fifteen-minute episodes about historical footnotes, but somehow he brings those footnotes to life. 

In August, I heard he was going to be releasing a book and I did something I've never done before. I emailed him asking for an advanced reading copy. 

Excerpt from that email:

I write a small bookish blog where I also write about podcasts, how much I hate working out, and the exploits of my dog and cat. I have also referred to you as a genius, a master of storytelling, a national treasure, and silver-tongued on this very same blog. I will buy and read your book and review it on my blog no matter what, but if you're doing any promotion for your book that involves bookish blogs with a small, but loyal contingent of readers, feel free to include me in that promotion. 

Friends, within two hours, Nate DiMeo had emailed me back personally with a link to an ARC. 

The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past by Nate DiMeo was such a treat to read. I loved every second of this book. DiMeo is a brilliant writer - you can really hear his voice in every word, every comma, and every story. He takes footnotes from history and makes them take center stage. I have been listening to the podcast for years (obviously) and reading this was like a greatest hits collage with some new material about DiMeo that contextualizes his interest in long forgotten histories. I loved it and hope we keep hearing form DiMeo for many years to come.

The expected publication date of this book is November 19 and I hope you all buy it or request it from your library the second it is released.  I'll remind you closer to the date. 

5/5 stars

Words I looked up:

imposture (location 1982) - an instance of pretending to be someone else in order to deceive others:

Lines of note: 

I want to conjure that peculiar magic that comes in those rare moments when we understand that the past was real. That our ancestors were real people. (location 88)

I loved reading about DiMeo's thought and writing process. His writing is magical. 

Because it requires this odd act of empathetic imagination through which I try to catch a glimpse of an answer to that most fundamental of questions: What is it like to be someone else? (location 91)

What an interesting motivation. 

In their decades tromping through the low grasses of Wisconsin, they developed an approach to studying animals that is common sense now, but was revolutionary then. It was interdisciplinary. Zoology needed botany, which needed meteorology, which needed limnology, and on and on. They realized you couldn't understand what was happening with the chickens that ate the seeds without understanding the plant that dropped the seeds, or the creatures who burrowed beneath the seeds, or the stream the fed the seeds. They learned that the prairie chicken needed the prairie itself to survive. They discovered that all its creatures - its bugs and its grasses, its birds and its trees and its creeks that froze over - all the countless little things combined somehow to give the species life. They were all connected. (location 650)

This paragraph is such a wonderful example of the importance of interdisciplinary work. I feel like I should blow it up in a poster-size and put it on my office wall. 

Elisha Otis didn't invent the elevator: He invented the brake. the little metal piece that catches the car and stops it from plummeting if the cable stops holding it up. Elisha Otis didn't invent the elevator, but he kind of invented the modern world. (location 988)

I can get behind DiMeo's slight exaggeration of the importance of the elevator brake, but also, maybe he's right?

I found that engaging actively with history - with stories of the past, of lives with beginnings and middles and ends, with periods of strife that felt unending but weren't, or peace or joy that couldn't hold - kept present the most valuable thing I knew: the fact that we are all going to die. (location 3259)

This went to a dark place, didn't it?

True short stories isn't a thing. How do you market that? Plus, the show was never that big. A beloved cult object at best. It was going to be a tough sell, the editors and agents would tell me. (location 3309)

True short stories! That's what this is! And I want more of it. 

Use reliable sources, don't plagiarize, figure out the truth and tell it as best you can. (location 3360)

DiMeo acknowledges later in this paragraph that his process is different than that of historians. Sometimes the truth is unknowable, with varying recorded histories and historians will walk you through all the options, weighing the validity of each source. DiMeo picks a story and tells it. And he tells it beautifully. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

There is a portrait that people think is of him, a Black man in a white chef's coat, his hair barely contained by his tight white chef's hat. (location 249)

And Anita Corsini sat in the audience in a purple dress and a light straw hat with a white plume. (location 246)

One day they were rebuilding the temple (scaffolding, hard hats, ancient dust catching the light through the windows) and work just stopped... (location 735)

She stands beside a crate, recently pried open by one of three customs officials in tall hats. (location 916)

The genocide and forced removal of Indigenous peoples in the West was in full swing, and the Thanksgiving story, in its reductive, construction-paper, Pilgrim-hat form, was offered up to soothe the discomfort of white Americans. (location 1318)

They arrived in top hats and tails, in pearls and peacock feathers. (location 1881)

Men in high hats and spats and lacquered canes. (location 2120)

At 3 A.M., Robert broke into the captain's quarters and stole his uniform, his pistols, and the broad straw hat he always wore to keep the sun from his eyes. (location 2591)

Smalls dressed in the captain's uniform, hat pulled down low despite the darkness...(location 2594)

But in the captain's hat, pulled low over his face, and with his collar up high...(location 2601)

Her hair pinned up under a hat. (location 2916)

Williams, in the peaked hat and coat familiar from elementary school Thanksgiving pageants...(location 3087)

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Have you ever emailed an author asking for an advanced reading copy? Have you ever had an ARC?