Time travel: Memories, identity and memoir: A personal essay

Narratives of time travel immediately suggest the genres of science fiction or fantasy. Few people would hold out memoir as a possible genre that also deals with time travel. Yet we all mentally time travel every day, travelling from minutes in time to decades in time as we recollect different periods in our lives, and imagine the future, unencumbered by time or space. It is these remembrances that give us our sense of identity. Without memoir identity fades and becomes ghostlike. Based on the work of theorists such as Eakin and Schacter, this creative work examines time travel, ghosts and the effects of personal history on identity, memory and memoir.