MEMENTO AMORIS is a collection of short fiction exploring how people preserve—and inevitably distort—emotional connection in the face of loss. The title invokes both memento mori and the keepsake, framing memory itself as a kind of object: something carried, yet degradable, falsifiable, or potentially discarded. Across four narratives, the collection examines the friction between the desire to hold onto love and the instability of the stories we tell about it.
Formally, the collection moves between near-death vision, epistolary fiction, annotated metafiction, and domestic realism, using each mode to interrogate a different relationship between memory and truth. A dying man relives love as it actually was, not as he wished it had been. A biographer shapes a dead woman's legacy while suppressing the evidence that complicates it. A confessional essay implicates its author even as it attempts to exonerate him. A widower must decide whether a digital simulacrum of his wife preserves her or replaces her. In each case, the act of remembering is also an act of interpretation—and interpretation, the collection suggests, is always, in some measure, a distortion.
MEMENTO AMORIS ultimately asks what we owe the dead, what we owe the truth, and whether those debts can be honored simultaneously.
