Jon Courtenay Grimwood

5. You seem to like playing with memories. For example, in reMix LizAlec steals/touches Lars' memories and in EoWB Kit accidentally steals Neku's memories (or breaks her memory bracelet). And add to that the psionics who ram through people's mental cellars. The question is: what are memories to you? How do you see them? What's their charm? (I hope that doesn't sound silly).

Memories are what make us. (I’m leaving aside that our memories are usually artificial constructs, edited and rewritten and remembered from earlier versions). The ability to remember we have a past means we know we have a future and don’t just live in the present like animals. It is this that gives us our sense of existing.

My characters are invariably at war with themselves and their memories are the battlefield. Having made memories important it seems obvious – well, to me as a writer – that having someone steal them also makes sense. What more can you steal from someone than their memories? How better to understand someone than to own what makes them what they are?

(I’m not actually sure we exist in any sense other than being here, in an ever-recreated present, thinking we know what happened before. But that’s a whole other conversation.)