Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, puts her finger on some real dangers of nostalgia. She writes, “There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.”
