Memory, Contreras learned, is like water: We need it, miss it when it is gone and too much is dangerous. She decided bodies are documents, repositories for memories that are “loops and loops of time,” the full weight of which are a burden.
For six years, bestselling author Ingrid Rojas Contreras wrote and rewrote the first chapter of her memoir, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds.” While simultaneously completing her first novel, “Fruit of the Drunken Tree,” teaching at Bay Area colleges and contributing essays and short stories to the New York Times Magazine, ZYZZYVA and other publications, the San Francisco-based, Colombian-born writer struggled to find entry to a story she knew was destined to be told.
The memoir begins with an accident. Contreras rode her bicycle into an open car door, suffered a head injury and experienced eight weeks of amnesia during which she writes, “I had no idea where I came from or where I was going, what city I was in, what my name was, and I did not even know the year.” The most compelling writing is about amnesia. “The amnesia was challenging to write about,” said Contreras. “So much of it was wordless, beyond language. It became a creative problem to make sense in language what I was experiencing. Describing the accident — it came slowly to me and I could only write one sentence and then walk away. Later, I’d write another sentence. It was a section I had to fight for.
The “ferocity of the line between truth and dreams” fascinates Contreras. “If I tried to solve that in the memoir, my story wouldn’t go anywhere. I had to release and surrender to what I’d been observing all my life: Occurrences that ask you to see someone who says to you assuredly that your mother has healed them from depression by giving them water after praying over it. You’re asked to accept that person and their experience.
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