From an interview with Roger Angell, posted online at the New Yorker website:

I wonder if people see nostalgia in [Let Me Finish] because it evokes nostalgia in them. I felt nostalgic reading it, and I wasn’t alive for most of the time you describe.

That era of travelling by ocean liner and travelling by car, the old world of travelling around on the highways of France, has gone by. And if you write about what it’s like dancing late at night on an ocean liner, it’s nostalgic, all right. But I don’t spend more than a minute a year thinking about it.

It’s a funny thing. What’s happened with this book is that I’ve put down a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, about my family and my past and my childhood and my parents. These are the same things that we all think about in the middle of the night — all of us, I think, many times telling ourselves the same stories over and over again, trying to get them to come out right. But since I’ve written this stuff, those stories have gone away. I don’t think about them anymore. It’s a loss. It’s as if I wrote them down as some sort of therapy, and now they’ve gone away. It’s the only thing about the book I’m sorry about.

An interesting counterpoint to the generally held view that we write in order to stave off forgetting. In a sense Angell is right: what is written down is more easily forgotten (I offer as proof the countless “to do” lists I’ve written, where adding an action to the list often becomes a substitute for the act itself) and his insight is confirmed by studies (Walter J. Ong et al) which show that members of oral cultures had prodigious memories, obtained through ars memoriae (arts of memory) such as the fascinating “memory palace” technique.

Consider, then, the possibility that most writers are well aware of the effect noted by Angell, and that the books they write (the ones we read) are those stories which they want to rid themselves of; the best stories, therefor — the ones these writers cannot bear the loss of — are the ones which they will never commit to print.