I’ve migrated my podcast to Substack, and am working out the kinks in that process. Which brings me to episode #975 of the Savage Lovecast, when Dan Savage and I discussed a caller’s question about repressed memories and sexual trauma. The photo promoting his podcast featured a series of phrases I never expected to find in combination with my name, so please enjoy!

As 2025 draws to a close, I’m hard at work on Season 3 of the podcast. This next season will be about a fundamental question I have about the recovered memory movement - why did those ideas make sense to me in 1989, but would not have been offered as an explanation in 1999? Why and how does culture shape and explain our innermost selves? I’m talking to experts in psychology and history to help sort it out, launching in early 2026.

Thanks for listening!

Nicholas Dames https://nicholasdames.org/contact-2/

Pride and Prejudice

Inside Out 2 - Nostalgia 

Dan Chaon https://danchaon.com/

Olivia Gatwood https://www.oliviagatwood.com/ 

Kat Rosenfield https://katrosenfield.com

Elif Batuman The Elif Life: A Great Time for Personal Narrative 

Gen Z is not reading

Recursion, a novel by Blake Crouch

Twin Peaks

The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, by Jennifer Lynch

Katie Roiphe's Harper's article about incest-related fiction can be accessed here, on my website:

https://www.memoryholepodcast.com/about

A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley

Featured in this episode:

Kate St. Vincent Vogl

Andromeda Romano-Lax

-Andromeda's novel, now in paperback

The Tell by Amy Griffen

Remembering Molly - Immediate and delayed false memory formation after acute MDMA exposure. Kloft, Otgaar, Blokland, Toennes, Ramaekers. Eur Neuropsychopharmacology

The Courage to Heal, as featured in Season 1, Episode 3

Professor Patrick Bray

-Article: Proust and the neurosciences

-According to Marcel Proust: new guidebook focusing on Proust's writing

Fran Mason - 73 Notebooks

Janet Malcolm Still Pictures

Why do people still believe in repressed memories? It's a mystery.

In this episode:

The first detective novel: The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins and the Birth of Amnesia; Nicholas Dames

Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Before I go to sleep by SJ Watson

Kat Rosenfield

'Elizabeth is Missing'

Black Eyed Susans

In the Woods

Tell Me A Story; an introduction to Season 2

Memory's misuse in storytelling

I made a second season because I wondered - why, if the recovered memory movement is over, do so many people still believe in repressed memories?

Season 2 is for you if:

-you love books, movies or otherwise escaping into a story

-you think about memory and forgetting

-you think about why we think about what we think about...

-you liked Season 1

-you like learning about debunked beliefs.

Please join me, won't you, once again, in The Memory Hole.

Featuring

Andromeda Romano-Lax

-Her Present Tense Substack, featuring the recent post Do We Care About How Memory Really Works? Amnesia, "useful" unreliability, and the return of the Memory Wars

-Her novel, The Deepest Lake

Kat Rosenfield

-Her Substack

-Her novel, You must remember this

Sources

Jonathan Lethem’s Vintage Book of Amnesia 

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Bourne Identity

Memento

Repressed memories in film

Welcome back to the Memory Hole.

This trailer features interviews with authors Andromeda Romano-Lax and Kat Rosenfield.

Complete links to guests and sources will be provided in upcoming episode notes at www.memoryholepodcast.com

Show notes for Episode 6:

Carrie Poppy

https://maximumfun.org/about/team/carrie-poppy/

Historian Edward Shorter

From Paralysis to Fatigue; a history of psychosomatic illness in the modern era

Idioms of distress

https://www.brightfutures.org/concerns/culture/cultural-concepts.html

Article in The Cut:

The Memory War; Jennifer Freyd accused her father of sexual abuse. Her parents’ attempt to discredit her created a defense for countless sex offenders.

Carrie’s response: The Letters New York Magazine Hasn’t Printed.

 Meredith Maran

Interview 5/23/2023

My Lie; A True Story of False Memory

Forward to the second edition Diana Russell’s book, The Secret Trauma, published in 1999.

 https://www.dianarussell.com/the_great_incest_war.html

Cover art collage by Jena Martin, using Solitude by Frederick Leighton 1890

Opening: The Confessions of St. Augustine, AD 401

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm

Interviews:

Dr. Henry Otgaar

Personal Website

Maastricht University 

Interview 9/21/2023

Dr. Sophie Scott

The Brain: 10 things you should know

X/Twitter

Interview 9/22/2023

Mentions:

Bart Simpson: Oh boy, time to repress another memory

⁠Season 14, Episode 17⁠

Dr. Scott mentions the 'Lost in the Mall' study

Context: https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XQze2hIAAGYP8ckl

Beyond Lost in the Mall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOpMhYGPajU

Explaining memories in the movie Inside Out - where they went wrong:

https://theconversation.com/does-pixars-inside-out-show-how-memory-actually-works-43311

Cover art collage featuring Mnemosyne, also titled Lamp of Memory and Ricordanza.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881.

“We look at the world once, 

in childhood. The rest

is memory.”

Louise Gluck

Any and all background music from the free YouTube Audio Library

The Memory Hole Podcast theme is: A Great Darkness Approaches, Can You Feel It? by  ELPHNT

This is a bonus episode, to bring you more from my interview conducted on June 28 2023 with Dr. Frederick Crews, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

If you listened to Episode 4 you heard a lot from him about
Freud. But he had lots more to say during our interview and I don’t want to condemn those words to a file on my computer. Plus he doesn’t have a lot of accessible interviews on the internet. I believe his voice needs to be heard.

About the guest:

Frederick Crews is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His many books include The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy, The Random House Handbook (currently in its sixth edition), and Postmodern Pooh.

Interview, 6/28/2023

Freud: The Making of an Illision

Episode cover art featuring Amalia Freud, Sigmund's mother.