A Review of Meik Wiking’s “The Art of Making Memories”
Happy Thoughts
When it comes to my memories, I have to say that they usually aren’t positive ones. The first thing that pops into my head is an instance of when I was in Grade Seven French class, and I pronounced a word in class out loud in a high falsetto voice. The teacher thought I was making fun of her (and I probably was), so she shipped me out to the Principal’s office to phone home about what I’d done. I remember the bus ride home that day, feeling dread in the pit of my stomach at confronting my mother and explaining my boorish behaviour to her. It was a sunny day, and that trip home seemed to take hours and not minutes. So, as you can see, I tend to think of the negative first, so when Meik Wiking’s The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments crossed my plate, I jumped at the chance to read it. Now that I’m approaching my 44th birthday, I wanted to know how I can create more positive memories for the second half of my life to make up for the seeming paucity of good ones in the first half.
Now, what this book won’t necessarily do is instantly make you forget all of your bad memories. As author Meik Wiking, a chatty and affable Danish man who has a current job as a happiness researcher (yes, such a profession exists!), will tell you, we all have to take the good with the bad. (To prove it, he recounts an episode from his first day on the job in government where he had unknowingly stepped in dog poop, and managed to stain the carpet in his new office building with it as he walked along.) However, Wiking challenges readers to take ownership of the bad memories so that they don’t take over your thoughts. So I suppose I just did that with the French lesson in the first paragraph of this review, using it as more of an instructive tool to illustrate a point rather than simply be something bad that takes up a lot of space. (See, this book is helpful!)
This self-help book is jammed with a lot of details and tips to get readers to start making happier memories for themselves. Wiking encourages everyone to start using their senses — including the underused sense of smell — to make more vivid memories, and more vivid memories are usually the happier ones. (I think that’s the point.) He challenges readers to try something new that they’re afraid of, because this creates an emotional highlighter pen of sorts that can be used to solidify a memory. He also is a proponent of curation, and encourages everyone to start documenting their lives on a private social media account right down to the mundane that they can later go back and select as to what is memorable or not. He also enthuses that happy memories that involve a struggle — for instance, I just started working out in a gym — will lead to a healthy memory once you reach the peak of that struggle — for me, being able to do my sets of exercises on my own without the personal trainer present, which gave me a boost of self-confidence and allowed me to save some money in my pocketbook.
Thus, there are a ton of great suggestions in this book. However, there’s a lot of meandering to get to them, which makes me kind of wonder if large portions of this book might have been better served as an Infographic. Before getting to the suggestions, Wiking delves into the science of what he’s about to talk about, so the most glaringly negative thing I can say about The Art of Making Memories is that he quotes the job titles of a lot of researchers, which leads to long and unwieldy sentences — stuff that might have been better served being placed into a footnote. That said, the meandering is kind of part of the fun, especially when the author starts to share some of his favourite memories — usually interesting things he did while travelling around the world.
In the end, The Art of Making Memories is memorable because it’s an unusual blend of the personal, almost memoir-ish, narrative and a more scientific tract. You get some of the science behind how memories are made, then you get practical advice as to how to use that science to get the best bang for your buck. And there’s a lot of stuff to process here, so there’s really no excuse for the reader to implement one or two tips that Wiking has to give that might work best for them. This book is just loaded with details, which, again, makes me wonder if digestible infographics might have been a better way of processing this information. All of this to say, you may think that I’m slagging the book, but that’s not the case at all. It could have been perhaps improved a bit by making the information easier to digest, but the fact that Wiking has a friendly, winning and positive personality more than makes up for any criticism you might have with this tome. It’s fun to read, and I’m sure that putting together a diary of memories of the good times I spent with my now deceased cat, Dot, would be a good and practical thing to do to remember the way she would go to sleep (chin resting on one arm, with a little wiggle of her head before closing her eyes to get comfortable).
Buy this book if you’re like me and have trouble making memories of things that are more positive in nature. I liked the suggestion about bringing a pineapple to a presentation one is about to give (assuming the venue is appropriate to do so) to make things memorable for both the audience and the speaker. In fact, there’s a ton of little suggestions like that that make this book remarkable and memorable. All in all, The Art of Making Memories is not a bad book. It could use some tweaks and perhaps not feel as though there’s a huge infodump of information being thrown at the reader by breaking things up a bit more or maybe paring back some of the personal narrative, which can be lengthy, but there’s enough substance here to warrant this book as a can’t miss proposition. Happy reading!
Meik Wiking’s The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments will be published by William Morrow on October 1, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
