I can’t remember how many times I have readIRemember. I discovered the book soon after it was published in 1975, and in the intervening three and a half decades I have gone back to it once every few years, perhaps seven or eight times in all. The text is not long (just 138 pages in the original edition), but remarkably enough, in spite of these numerous re-readings, whenever I open Joe Brainard’s little masterwork again, I have the curious sensation that I am encountering it for the first time. Except for a few indelible passages, nearly all of the memories recorded in the pages ofI Remember have vanished from my own memory. There are simply too many details to hold onto over an extended period of time, too much life is packed into Brainard’s shifting, swirling collage of recollections for any one person to remember it in its entirety, and therefore, even if I recognise many of the entries the instant I start to reread them, there are many others that I don’t. The book remains new and strange and surprising – for, small as it is,I Remember is inexhaustible, one of those rare books that can never be used up.
A prolific visual artist and occasional writer, Brainard stumbled upon the simple but ingenious composition method ofIReme
