The vignette at the beginning of Hampl’s essay is used to connect the reader with the author. People are intrigued by stories that they themselves can relate to. Like Hampl, everyone has random splotches of memories from their childhood. Hampl’s essay helps readers realize that just like Hampl, they too may havre mis-remembered these memories they believed formed their childhood. “We store in memory only images of value… This, we say somewhere within us, is something I’m hanging on to,” (Hampl 29). By providing the vignette at the beginning of the story, it allows the reader to form their own interpretation in their mind of the scene that is being drawn out in front of them. Then for the rest of the essay the readers come to understand that many details of the story are fabricated. That Hampl used this vignette to explore the deep recesses of her memories, to write “in order to find out what [she] knows,” (Hampl 27).
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