Have you ever seen the movie Memento? If not- go do it! It’s really good. Trust me.

For a schoolassignment we had to turn a movie into a book, and for this I picked Memento. What I thought was interesting about the movie was the story Leonard keeps telling over and over again. The story is about Sammy Jankis, a man who has no short-term memory. Just like Leonard himself. I re-wrote this story so it was set in second-person, so that the reader would feel in the same position as Leonard, what it’s like to have his condition.

On the first four pages you read the story like Leonard tells it in the movie. However, with Leonard’s condition you can’t focus for too long and soon you will start to forget things. The four pages that come next tell the exact same story, which would make you a bit confused if you did have this condition. But the worst part is distraction! When Leonard is distracted from what he’s doing, he instantly forgets what he was doing, with who and why. All of it.

Suddenly you find a folded page in the middle of the story. When you fold it open, you’re distracted from the story and thus forget everything that you read; the space underneath the fold is empty. That was the end of your memory, because like with Leonard your shortterm memory fails to work when you read this book. Therefor, the rest of the book is empty.