the problem of an inconsolable memory

"It sometimes seemed as if the author of the Book of Fish, the storyteller William Buelow Gould, had been born with a memory but neither experience nor history to account for it and had spent forever after seeking to invent what didn't exist in the curious belief that his imagination might become his experience, and thereby both explain and cure his problem of an inconsolable memory."

from Gould's Book of Fish
by Richard Flanagan