“Finding wonder in the past makes me a bit more open to wonder in the present,” says the writer Nate DiMeo. In new book The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past, DiMeo introduces a slate of characters that traverse, with keen wonder, through the annals of history: grape pickers march across California with Cesar Chavez, a socialite moves to Wisconsin to study prairie chickens, a child sits on a roof for years trying to photograph the solar system.
As with DiMeo’s popular long-running podcast of the same name, all these characters are real people lifted from the past and given, in DiMeo’s grave, sonorous voice, brief poetic treatment. In the book version of the popular podcast—released by Random House on November 19—fans will find new stories, photographs, and other ephemera alongside favorite show segments.
Ahead of a December 2 book tour stop at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, DiMeo sat down with the INDY to talk about the process of putting the book together and how learning about the past can crack open greater possibilities for the present. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
INDY: How did you determine which stories belong in the book?
NATE DIMEO: At this point, there’ve been 223 stories in the 16 years of The Memory Palace. And so there was a lot of picking and choosing, about what would work and which things hinged upon sound too much, and which ones would work on the page and which ones wouldn’t.
As a kid, there were so many books that were collections of short pieces that my dad had purchased probably for, like, a dime each, these old paperbacks of Ripley’s Believe It or Not stories or Guinness Book of World Records, these things that you might pick up off the shelf over and over. And six months later, you’d read something and you’d be that little bit older, and suddenly this one would click. People have talked to me about the show and that’s kind of the way it works—people listen to some stories, but every once in a while one will knock them out and there’s something about it that speaks to them in their life.
[I was] thinking back to those books that I loved so much as a kid: What happens when you build one of those for adults, where the randomness is the point? You open [the book] up and are not expecting to laugh, and suddenly you are, or you’re not expecting to cry, and suddenly you are—a book that could sneak up on you. Books used to do that all the time as a kid, and they stopped doing that when you’re an adult. I wanted to bring a little bit of that back.
Was that part of the decision not to order things chronologically?
Yeah, absolutely. Part of the way that the show works is that you go in cold, by design. It is anti-algorithmic in that way—I’m sure I could probably find more listeners if I could maximize my SEO and, you know, follow some, like, Mr. Beast format and figure out exactly how to entice and hook people.
Please don’t.
Yes, thank you. Thank you. The truth of the matter is, I know that if you tell someone “Here’s a story about the second woman to ever cross the English Channel” or “Here’s this woman who made sculptures in butter,” you might think, “I don’t care about this woman who makes sculptures in butter.” But I want you to, and I don’t want you to come in with your guard up, so I don’t tell you what it’s going to be. In this book, I continue to do that. There is no table of contents. You enter each story cold and with the first line, hopefully, it will raise some mystery or question that you want to be answered with the next one.
I’m curious what you feel the difference may be to listening to this material versus reading it.
It is a leap of faith, and I do think that for me in particular, it was a difficult one to make, because as a person talking, you know what a good audio sentence is, and I have more faith in that than I might in a good book sentence. Music can do a lot of work, and pacing can do a lot of work. Dramatic pauses are dramatic for a reason, and it’s difficult to simulate a dramatic pause on the page.
What I’ve noticed is that that sort of imaginary space that all history has to live in—because we have no other way to access it—there’s a conjuring act that feels like magic.
I realized that is the same thing that happens when you read: If you are reading a Jane Austen novel and riding the bus, part of you is on that bus and part of you is in the Cotswolds in 1805, or whatever. Holding those two spaces is wonderful.
I started to notice that that’s the same way that history and memory live—it kind of occupies the present at the same time. In the same way that if you’re walking the dog and part of you is back in the argument that you’re going over in your head that you had the night before, or you are reading a book and it is a dry factual account of Gettysburg, and part of you is on the battlefield, and part of you is, again, on that bus.
The thing that kind of cracked how I could tell these stories was realizing that it was the same as the book—that what you’re doing is giving details and describing things using the same tools of poetic devices or literary devices and trying to create that same kind of fictional space. And that there was nothing wrong in doing that because the facts were there and it was accurate in that fictional space, which is all we ever have of the past.
In the introduction you talk about how, when learning about a historical figure there can be this moment—some decision or action the figure takes—where they feel real. I wonder about the importance of that kind of moment, when—in our own age—there’s AI and misinformation and people are having a harder time putting a shape around the present and what is “real.”
I’m very aware of how miasmic and conflicted the present always is. If we were to go back in time right now, and it was 2012 or 2009 and things weren’t so crazy with social media and fake news and AI was but a glimmer in some mathematician’s eye—life is really chaotic, even then, it was really chaotic. You would read something very practical and normal, like The New York Times opinion page and there’d be nine different things that were explaining, you know, the Obama administration or whatever was happening. And you would not buy some of it, and you would be like, “I think Maureen Dowd is wrong about this thing.” The truth of the matter is the story that all these people are telling about the present…you can argue about all of this stuff all the time. Because we do.
The present itself is always so contingent and up for debate. It’s always this process of coming to a mutual understanding through language and stories. So why shouldn’t the past be anything else? If there’s anything that I am trying to remember or let my readers know about the past it’s that it is just like the present. The people in the past were just like us and were real people.
On history and historians
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the people that we read about in the news today are real people. It takes a leap of imagination to put yourself in their shoes, or even in the shoes of the person who’s a couple of rows away on the bus.
To me, there’s something really valuable about looking to the past and seeing the ways in which people’s lives are constricted or determined or enabled by the economic condition and rules and mores of the day and what was simply in the air they breathed or the work they were allowed to do. It reminds me that the present is no different—that our time now is itself historical. And it snaps me into a kind of presence.
All of the strangeness and disassociation and unreality of the present, while very pointed right now because the questions about AI are so present—the truth is, I think it was there all the time, we just had a bit more comfort in the things that we were hanging our hats on. And now it feels like our hat is going to fall if we hang it on this piece of news or that piece of news.
I don’t want you to feel like you have to give any spoilers away about your event, but you are going to reference some stories from North Carolina. Is that right?
What will go down at this event is that I’ll tell stories for a while, and then I’ll have a conversation about the book and about process and stuff like that. A lot of the stories are pretty dynamic and set to music, there are visuals and some pretty incredible animations that, over time, I’ve commissioned and worked with people on. And I will also be reading, including a North Carolina story that is really pivotal in the book about the Outer Banks. It’s a good time. It really is.
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