Anatomy of an Idea

MEMENTO NORA (the novel) started out as a short story I wrote for Odyssey Magazine.  You can read "Memento Nora," the short story here.  In nutshell, though, the story is about 14-year-old Nora James  going to her first Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic (TFC) to have a memory erased.



Where did the idea come from? My "formula" for this germ of a story was:

OBSESSION + CONSTRAINTS + RESEARCH + WHIM = THIS IDEA

OBSESSION.  I've always been fascinated with memory. I'm not sure why, but it was one...