Comme ci, comme ça
Seven years ago, my boss got my girlfriend’s name wrong. He thought it was Veronica. It wasn’t — her name was Victoria — but he called her “Ronny” anyway, confidently, like a man who’d never once been corrected in his life. It stuck as a joke between us for years.
More recently, I was in a car with someone whose friends call her Nessa. I call her Vanessa. I asked what name she liked to be called and joked, “My friends call me Nessa, but he calls me Vanessa, because he’s an asshole.” I was quoting my own bit back at her, except the joke had traveled seven years and rearranged itself into something new. She told me she actually likes being called Vanessa. So I kept it.
That’s where my book, My Name is Veronica, came from. Not from a prompt. From a wrong name in an office seven years ago, and a right answer in a car a few weeks ago, and a decade of paying attention to the way people’s names bend depending on who’s saying them and why. Ronny is a joke that means “I never really knew you.” Vanessa, chosen on purpose, is a name that means “I asked.”
None of that connection existed anywhere until I made it. It wasn’t retrievable. It wasn’t sitting in a database waiting for the right query. It existed because two unrelated moments — a boss’s mistake and a stranger’s question — were both loaded into the same brain, at rest, for seven years, until one day they touched.
Understanding isn’t just the difficulty of producing a sentence, though that’s real too. It’s the accumulation, over years, of things you didn’t know were related until they suddenly were. A name mangled by a boss. A name chosen on purpose by a woman in a car. A grandmother’s nickname that “doesn’t have an edge on it anywhere.” A father who leaves and takes one specific syllable with him forever, a name nobody else is allowed to touch. None of these things arrived together. They arrived years apart, in different rooms, from different people, and they only became a book because they were all sitting in the same head, un-outsourced, when the moment came to connect them.
You cannot query for a connection you don’t know you’re missing. Retrieval assumes you already know what you’re looking for. Insight is what happens when two things you weren’t looking for turn out to rhyme — and you can’t ask for that in advance, because the question doesn’t exist yet.
Socrates worried that writing would ruin memory — that once you could look something up, you’d stop having to hold it. He was right, in a narrow sense. But there’s a version of that worry that matters more today, and it isn’t really about memory. It’s about residency. Information has to live somewhere for a while — unresolved, half-understood, bumping into other things — before it can produce a genuine connection. If you outsource the holding, you also outsource the bumping.
That’s the actual risk with leaning on AI to think for you. It’s not that the tool doesn’t know things — it knows practically everything, more reliably than any human brain ever will, and it will happily hand you a citation, a counterargument, a synthesis on demand, without forgetting and without getting tired. But it doesn’t require you to hold the material. And if the information never has to live in your head — never has to sit there for seven years next to an unrelated moment in a car — it can’t quietly recombine with something else you’re carrying. You can ask a model to connect two things for you, and it might do it well. But you have to know to ask. I don’t think I could have prompted my way to that book — the question itself hadn’t taken shape yet. It only existed because two memories had already been living together, quietly, for seven years.
I want to be careful this doesn’t come off as nostalgia for a harder way of doing things. Struggle for its own sake isn’t the point — plenty of people read four hundred books a year and never write anything worth reading, because reading isn’t the same as attending. What seems to matter is retention with attention: letting something sit long enough, and noticing enough of the small stuff along the way, that it’s still there later, uninvited, when something else comes along that it happens to rhyme with.
My name is Veronica. But if you’re a good listener, maybe you’ll get to call me Ronny.