Time and the Truth in a Memoir

The way "My Colombian War" is written, the reader gets different understandings about the central topic at different times. In a memoir, it is more challenging to remember how you felt at the time or what you thought. Paternostro gives facts to the reader with no emotional attachment because she was either not in the country or narrates the news with no basis in herself.

A memoir like this one seems to play with time in the sense that as Paternostro describes certain situations, she goes back and forward with her own expieriences, facts, and her families expieriences. As it combines these three elements, the reader gets a clearer picture of the topic Paternostro bases her memoir on. By combining the personal expieriences with the explanations of certain facts, Paternostro ties herself with her topic in a way that this can truly be considered a memoir.

For example, when explaining a marimbero is, Paternostro ties it to herself by telling the story of how her friend Allegra dated and married one. Through this relationship a marimbero can be closely detailed when Paternostro describes them as men that drove fancy cars "wore designer everything: Versace sunglasses, Versace jeans, even Versace perfume." (Page 130-131). Paternostro is writing about these marimberos from the present and by offering this clear example in her past, the reader can fully grasp what a marimbero is. In a sense, the way Paternostro uses time in the memoir helps explain what is unknown to the reader clearly, without ever losing that sense that this is a memoir.

Reading My  Colombian war, you become very trusting of the author. One assumes that, this being a memoir, everything is considered true but if its hard to remember event the most important moments in our life, who is to say Paternostro isn't making some of this up. In the case of this memoir the trust you place on the authos is because of these details. When she goes into depth describing small detaills like the unform of the girls at the Marymount school or the way she felt in certain situations, the reader becomes more trustiing of the story. In the back of the readers mind some of these details could be fake but they add more meaning to the memoir.

The question then rises to be, how much of a memoir is memory and how much is what our memory thinks it remembers. Its possible some of these details might have been distorted because of time but then that wouldn't exactly make them fake. In a sense it could be thought of as the character from Fight Club. While he isn't fully aware of what happens his subconcious is and just distorts the details. So you have a part of you that does remember and a part of you that, like in Fight Club, needs to be tapped in order to be unleashed.