---
title: "A Historian Puts His Memoir on Facebook and Lets Readers Edit His Memory"
description: "Ten years, 2,000 posts and a comment section that keeps correcting what he thought happened to him"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-05T10:00:00Z
modified: 2026-10-06T14:32:14Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-historian-puts-his-memoir-on-facebook-and-lets-readers-edi-19ba9f
language: en
tags: ["memoir", "history", "psychology", "social-media", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A Historian Puts His Memoir on Facebook and Lets Readers Edit His Memory

*Ten years, 2,000 posts and a comment section that keeps correcting what he thought happened to him*

By Luis Goa · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-historian-puts-his-memoir-on-facebook-and-lets-readers-edi-19ba9f

## In brief

- Thomas Söderqvist has posted nearly 2,000 memoir episodes to Facebook over about a decade, 3–4 a week
- Posts draw over 1,000 followers and about 100 regular commenters, with threads reaching up to 200 comments
- Reader comments have corrected claims about an ex-partner’s health and reframed one of his own stories as vanity, not bravery
- The project follows his 2003 biography of Nobel laureate Niels Jerne, built on 150 hours of interviews and Jerne’s own archive
- He cites philosopher Galen Strawson’s ‘episodic self’ theory to justify leaving the memoir’s narrative deliberately unresolved

Thomas Söderqvist, a retired professor of the history of medicine at the University of Copenhagen, has published nearly 2,000 episodes of his own life on Facebook over roughly the past decade, three or four a week, each running 300 to 500 words and taking him about a day to write, as he recounts in [an essay for Aeon](https://aeon.co/essays/what-i-have-learned-from-posting-episodes-of-my-life-on-facebook). At 400 words a post, the median, that is on the order of 800,000 words of serialized autobiography, written not before publication but during it, with the record staying open to correction the whole time.

The readership is small enough to argue with. Söderqvist reports more than 1,000 followers, concentrated in Sweden, Denmark, the UK and the US, with a core of about 100 regular commenters — roughly one in ten of the people who see the posts. Individual episodes have drawn up to 200 comments; he says engagement has fallen off lately from that peak. A conventional memoir gets reviewed once, after it is finished. This one gets reviewed, piecemeal, by the same hundred people, in public, while it is still being written.

The raw material predates the posting by years. After retiring in 2016, Söderqvist packed decades of professional papers into removal boxes, added private diaries, letters and photographs, downloaded tens of thousands of work emails from the university server, and spent three years reading and note-taking through all of it, year by year, before he wrote a single public episode. He also went back to people from his past — former colleagues, teachers, old partners — and checked their memories against his own, a step closer to oral-history fieldwork than to conventional memoir drafting.

**How a private archive becomes a public, corrected memoir** Based on Thomas Söderqvist's account of his own process

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Papers, diaries, emails *(decades of personal and professional files)* | Three years of note-taking *(read year by year before any posting)* |  |
| Three years of note-taking *(read year by year before any posting)* | 300–500 word episode |  |
| 300–500 word episode | Posted to Facebook |  |
| Posted to Facebook | Reader comments *(up to 200 per post)* |  |
| Reader comments *(up to 200 per post)* | Self-image revised |  |
| Self-image revised | 300–500 word episode | feeds next episode |
| Posted to Facebook | Cross-posted to canities.dk |  |

Based on [Thomas Söderqvist](https://aeon.co/essays/what-i-have-learned-from-posting-episodes-of-my-life-on-facebook)

The clearest case Söderqvist gives is also the oldest memory in the archive. At about 15, alone in the family flat, he found his mother’s pocket calendar from 1946 pushed to the back of a drawer. An entry for mid-March read “Party at the Academic Association”; the next day’s entry read “God, what have I done!” He was born in December that year. He had told the story in person for decades before he posted it, and had always told it, he assumed, more or less straight.

> “Absolutely flat. No affect. A Max von Sydow deadpan. But yes, you ironised.”

That correction came from Betty, a friend from his years as a postdoc at Stanford, replying to the Facebook post. She had heard him tell the story before and told him the written version had dropped something: the delivery. Söderqvist hadn’t known he told his own origin story as a deadpan joke. One person’s memory, decades old and unrecorded anywhere else, is the entire evidential basis for that correction — the calendar itself did not survive to be checked against anything. By Söderqvist’s own account on his companion site, [canities.dk](https://www.canities.dk/autobiography/english/i-was-a-mistake), the diary was not among his mother’s few belongings after her death in 2014. The primary document is gone; what remains is one memory correcting another, in public, with an audience watching.

Other corrections follow the same shape. He had attributed a former partner’s mood swings to diabetes; a reader pointed out she never had diabetes, and that he’d used the illness to excuse having left her. He’d described publicly challenging a senior professor’s self-congratulatory keynote as a brave moment; three commenters read it back to him as vanity and insensitivity, a pattern he’d repeated elsewhere. A post about a female student in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt at a 1980s conference split readers between accusing him of still objectifying her in the retelling and defending the detail as honest reporting. In one case the correction came from himself: writing about a compulsion to raise his hand at academic talks, he traced it to a childhood memory of being told to stop singing, then realised he had already drawn that same connection in an earlier post and had completely forgotten doing so. Two thousand posts in, his own archive has blind spots he can’t see without rereading it.

The project is a late turn in a career built on other people’s archives. In 1986, newly finished with his first book, Söderqvist met the Danish immunologist Niels Jerne, who two years earlier had shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the selection theory of antibodies and the network theory of the immune system. Jerne showed him an attic in southern France stacked with grocery bags of letters, diaries, lab protocols and manuscripts — he had kept almost everything he’d ever written. Over roughly 150 hours of conversation with Jerne and interviews with more than 90 of his friends, colleagues and relatives, Söderqvist built the material for *[Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne](https://archive.org/details/scienceasautobio00suml)*, published by Yale University Press in 2003, nine years after Jerne’s death in 1994.

Söderqvist joined Copenhagen as professor of the history of medicine in 1999 and ran the university’s medical history museum, renamed \[Medical Museion\](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical\_Museion\_(Copenhagen)) in 2004, until he retired in 2016 — the decade he now cites as the start of turning the same method on himself.

For the theoretical cover, Söderqvist reaches for the philosopher Galen Strawson, who in a 2004 paper, [“Against Narrativity”](https://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf), split people into “diachronic” types who experience their life as a continuous story and “episodic” types who don’t feel their past self and present self are the same entity. Strawson counts himself episodic and argues the episodic life is no less full than the diachronic one. Söderqvist adopts the same label for himself and uses it to argue that an autobiography that never resolves into a tidy single narrative isn’t a failed memoir — it’s a more accurate one.

That argument has a hole an engineer would flag immediately. The correction mechanism Söderqvist credits with revising his self-image runs on a sample of roughly 100 people, self-selected by who bothers to comment, checking one person’s memory against another person’s memory, with no transcript, recording or document surviving for most of the episodes in question — the 1946 diary is the explicit case, not the exception. Betty’s testimony about the “Max von Sydow deadpan” is one witness’s recollection of a story told decades ago, no more independently verifiable than Söderqvist’s own version was. The Belafonte-seminar episode shows the same limitation scaled down: distributing a life across 2,000 Facebook posts instead of one head didn’t stop the project from forgetting a connection it had already made once. The feedback loop catches some errors. It has no mechanism for catching the ones nobody happens to remember to check.

It also runs on a platform that isn’t built to keep a decade of posts available on request. Meta’s handling of long-running Facebook data has already made news this month, after [a Toronto woman’s 20 years of photos](https://rews.cc/a/meta-erases-20-years-of-a-toronto-woman-s-photos-and-only-a--e0d6fd) disappeared from her account with no human support channel to appeal to. Söderqvist cross-posts to his own site, canities.dk, which hedges that risk somewhat — but the live correction mechanism, the comment threads that do the actual work of revising his self-image, exists only on Facebook, on Meta’s terms, for as long as Meta keeps it there.

Söderqvist says engagement has already dropped from its 200-comment peak. A project that depends on an audience to generate the corrections it’s built around doesn’t produce a finished memoir by design, on his own telling, but it also doesn’t run itself once the audience thins out. At roughly 2,000 posts and ten years in, the open question isn’t whether the dialogue has changed what he remembers — he has the receipts for that — it’s how much more correcting is left to do once the commenters stop showing up.

## See also

- [Emeritus — Reflections of an ageing academic](https://www.canities.dk/) — canities.dk · Söderqvist's companion memoir blog, cross-posting and expanding the Facebook episodes
- [Medical Museion (Copenhagen)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Museion_%28Copenhagen%29) — en.wikipedia.org · Background on the museum Söderqvist ran from 1999 to 2016
- [Book review: Science as Autobiography: the troubled life of Niels Jerne](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC547934/) — pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Scholarly review assessing Söderqvist's biographical method on Jerne