Seven immortals awake on a beach with no memories and no names.
This is the premise of Oldie, and it requires some justification, because amnesia as a narrative device has a reputation — one that is, generously, mixed.
The version of amnesia that has earned this reputation is the mystery-delivery system: a character wakes up without memories so that the reader and the character learn the character’s past together, with the hidden backstory serving as the engine of the plot. The amnesia is a hook for revelation, and the revelation is the point.
That’s not exactly what I’m doing here.
The amnesia in Oldie is a philosophical question wearing a plot device’s clothes.
The question is: What are you when you take everything away?
Not: what happened to you, what will you discover, what secrets are buried in your past.
But: who are you, right now, with nothing to lean on? What is the irreducible you that exists before the story of you, outside of it, at the level of what you actually are rather than what you’ve accumulated?
The seven Dreamers wake up on a beach without their names, without their histories, without the relationships and memories and earned knowledge that constitute the self they’ve spent centuries building.
They are still themselves.
The Dream is still there — the Stone, the Wind, the Glass, the Flame, the Sea, the Wood, the Night.
The deep character is still there, because deep character is not stored in memory. It’s structural.
What they don’t have is the story of themselves.
I became interested in this question during a period when I was thinking a lot about identity and continuity — about what makes you the same person across time, whether you are, and whether that sameness is as valuable as we treat it.
There’s a standard philosophical account of personal identity that locates it in memory: you are the same person you were twenty years ago because you remember being that person, because the chain of memory connects you to yourself across time. Break the chain and you have, in some meaningful sense, a different person.
But this can’t be quite right. Or rather, it’s right about one thing — the narrative self, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves — while missing something else. The version of you that exists in your body, in your habits, in your reflexes, in your instincts and your gut reactions and the specific things that make you laugh or flinch or feel at home. That version doesn’t live in memory. It lives in what you are.
Oldie is built around the collision between those two selves: the narrative self that the Dreamers have lost but still owe, and the structural self that remains.
Holder Stone is the exception: she woke up with her memories intact. And this is presented in the novel not as a gift but as a weight. She knows who everyone is. She knows what they were. She has to watch her family — the people she loves most in the world — discover themselves for the first time, without being able to give them back what they’ve lost. She can tell them their names. She can’t tell them what their names mean to them.
The amnesia isolates. But it also, in a strange and specific way, protects.
The Dreamers who wake up empty are frightened and disoriented, but they are also, briefly, free. They don’t have the accumulated weight of who they used to be. They can make choices they might not have made with a thousand years of history looking over their shoulders. They can be surprised by themselves.
Holder Stone cannot. Holder Stone is haunted by precisely the richness and completeness of her memory, by all the ways the people she loves are failing to be who they were, by the gap between what was and what is.
The question the novel is quietly asking — the one underneath the adventure, the one I’ve been sitting with for years — is whether we are the sum of our memories or whether there’s something that precedes and survives them.
And whether starting over, even when it’s forced, even when it’s terrifying, might sometimes be the thing that lets you become who you actually are.
I don’t know the answer yet. That’s why I’m writing the book.