What will we forget first? The destruction of Mariupol or the Oscar slap? Writing a memoir tells me it is sometimes the minor moments we remember best.

A snake suddenly slithers across the road in front of you. You are seven years old in another country, without your parents. You are so afraid, you don’t want to cross that road again but it is the road to your home now. You don’t write about it then. You have no evidence it happened other than the seared memory of fear in your mind. You never forget that moment.

A war rages day after day, year after year, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese alike. You remember the photo of a South Vietnamese general shooting a man in the head, the blood spattering mid-air.

Trauma can sear memories but what of the small moments? What do they tell us?

Your grandmother making your breakfast in her kitchen in Pittsburgh. Swinging as high as you could in the backyard of your caregiver. Her name was Franny. Having coffee with your aunt in a Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street.

Playing pinball at John & Ann’s in Ocean Beach on Fire Island. The feeling of the silver ball hitting the pins, the sight of lights flashing.The teenagers sitting on the low concrete wall outside the screen door. It was painted green.

Your best friend’s mother, ironing shirts in the living room of her apartment. Her big smile when she sees you and calls out your name in greeting. Her red lipstick.

Your stepfather singing to you once, playing the piano.

Finding the babydoll on a high shelf in your mother’s closet, a Christmas present-to-be. Feeling sad and ashamed for finding it.

Your father lifting you high in his arms in a Greenwich Village park.

Riding in your brother’s school bus around the corner once, too young for school yourself.

How does memory work anyway?

Yesterday you scrambled to find something. You thought you knew where it was. It wasn’t there. You looked in the car, in your office, in junk drawers in the den. You found it. Where did you find it? You can’t remember. Five minutes later, you could not remember where you found it. How does memory work?

Your mother lost her mind. She had good reason to but does that mean you will too?

You struggle to remember a name. Then you do. What does it mean? Is it just too much information over a lifetime? Scientists say we have over a million gigabytes of memory available to us. At that rate you could watch TV 24 hours a day every day and it would take 300 years to fill your brain with junk.

An actor stops acting. He has memorized thousands of pages of dialogue over a lifetime. But he has forgotten how to speak. He is younger than you are. Will he recover?

Your aunt has had a stroke. She can’t speak, except sometimes in singing. “Another part of the brain,” the doctors say. Once someone whose life was talking and reading and listening as a psychotherapist, she can neither read nor write.

We don’t just remember what we want to. Sometimes memories plague us. The sight of bodies falling from windows of the World Trade Center. They say that revisiting traumatic memories can help dilute their effects.

It’s a conundrum, remembering things we would rather forget and forgetting things we want to remember. Who’s in charge, here?

You would think remembering even just one war would make us want to stop them all.