Plot and memory

From Vulture: "There's something that goes away quickly when we close a book, or the screen goes dark, or the curtain falls: the memory of just what happened, in what order, and why. Plots are ghostly things in our brains. It can be hard to keep a grasp of them even as you're reading a novel or watching a film or a play. I sometimes fret that I have a better memory of the font certain novels were printed in than the incidents that riveted me as I was reading them. But it's plot that keeps us turning pages, even when we feel no sympathy or the opposite of sympathy for a fiction's characters and animating ideas."