A writer may revisit a place because she cannot quite believe it exists.

Evidence

It’s fraught terrain, with an intricate and fascinating industrial history—yet famous, post-industrially, for nothing but the Moors murders and Harold Shipman. It’s where I grew up, and this must be the reason I bought the book when Jonathan Cape published it in 1989. I have an inability to fully believe in the village where I was born, and when I was a child, if I found it on a map, I would stare and stare, squashing the name under my finger: there it is in print, so it must be real. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 193

Categorization

• SEED: The childhood need to verify one’s birthplace against a map—and the eerie territory famous only for murders—is an essay or short-story seed about place and memory.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 193
• XREF: connects to: Childhood familiarity with a place makes its real-world existence seem fragile — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 193; Imagination grants access to a place the writer has never visited — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 988; Writing seeks the ‘there’ of a place rather than its events — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1088

Broader Connections

• Imagination grants access to a place the writer has never visited #expands (0.55) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 988