Legendary horror author Stephen King’s Facebook relationship status with the concept of memory, if such a thing existed, would clearly read: “It’s complicated.” In fact, a lot of King’s work explores what people often call the “burden of memory” theme, with the prime example coming from my favorite King work of all time: IT. In the novel, a dense read that clocks in at over 1,100 pages, King turns memory into both a weapon and a wound.
On the one hand, memory saves the central characters of the story — the Losers Club — both as children and as adults, while at the same time placing their older selves directly in Pennywise’s path of gory death and destruction. King sets up one of his most emotionally devastating endings by having Stan, Bill, Eddie, Mike, Beverly, Ben, and Richie — the friend group at the heart of the story — completely forget each other after they leave their hometown of Derry, Maine, where IT lives.
They forget their unusually tight friendships, the evil monster they fought, and everything about their hometown. The message is pretty clear. This forgetting happens again after the adult characters return to Derry to put Pennywise the clown down once and for all. As the adults wander around town, they slowly remember the traumatic encounters they endured with psychotic bullies, the shape-shifting cosmic entity known as Pennywise, and the strangely apathetic town that never seemed to care about missing children.
Recovering these memories rips open old wounds that had faded and nearly leads to their deaths, yet remembering proves essential to stopping Pennywise. Ultimately, after they finally defeat the villain, they begin forgetting everything all over again.
King tries to tell us that forgetting the bad things in our lives functions as a kind of mercy. Trauma fades. Life goes on. End of story. But there’s just one problem: that’s not how trauma actually works. As much as we hate enduring rough patches or horrific experiences, those moments often serve as the primary inciting incidents for explosive growth. Trauma works like Miracle-Gro slapped onto the soil of life.
It’s not surprising that King takes this view, given that he grew up during a time when culture treated memory like a minefield — poke too much or too hard and everything explodes. In what I consider his magnum opus, when the Losers Club gets called back to Derry, they immediately relapse into self-destructive behavior and emotional stagnation. One of the seven, Stanley Uris, experiences almost total recall of the group’s first encounter with Pennywise when fellow Losers Club member Mike Hanlon — who stayed in Derry and chose to remember — calls him home.
The memories overwhelm Stanley so completely that he won’t face them a second time and instead chooses suicide. As the keeper of memory, Mike carries the burden of watchman on the wall, and it nearly crushes him emotionally. He lives cut off and isolated. From Mike’s perspective, forgetting looks like mercy because remembering feels like death. But here in the real world, psychology tells a very different story. You can’t magically forget horrific experiences. And even if you could, the scars would remain — anxiety, depression, crippling nightmares or night terrors, all without clear explanations. You cannot heal trauma by erasing it.
Modern trauma research — especially work on post-traumatic stress disorder, adverse childhood experiences, and narrative identity — shows that fragmented or repressed memories don’t disappear. They often grow stronger over time, manifesting as compulsive behavior, addiction, or distorted self-perception.
You might mentally check out, but your body will still demand payment. Forgetting does not equal freedom. King actually proves this through Beverly’s character arc. Bev suffers abuse and bullying as a child, especially from her father. When she grows up and “forgets” Derry, she marries a man who mirrors—if not exceeds—her father’s violence, subjecting her to severe beatings and what amounts to rape. Her trauma never vanished; it cried out from the depths of her subconscious, demanding acknowledgment.
Bill Denbrough, the boy the Losers Club looks to as its leader, grows up to become a horror author, drawing fuel from his traumatic childhood — especially the murder of his brother Georgie by Pennywise, an event he rarely remembers consciously. The trauma still lived beneath the surface, festering for nearly three decades.
Eddie Kaspbrack offers another example. His overbearing mother, a poster child for Munchausen syndrome, controls every aspect of his childhood. When Eddie grows up and forgets her, he marries a woman who fills the same role — just with a gentler touch.
Forgetting their trauma didn’t heal them. It forced them to repeat it.
When the group reunites after IT returns and leaves blood and guts across Derry, healing begins as they trade stories and remember the joy of their childhood friendship. They face the darkness together in a safe environment, supported by one another. When they drag the monsters into the light, those monsters lose their power. They weaken. The group realizes they can win.
For a moment, King seems to grasp this truth. Then he undercuts it by insisting the Losers Club must forget again to truly move on — despite two-thirds of the novel arguing the opposite. True healing would have meant letting them remain a tight-knit support network, the very thing that gave them hope in the first place.
Remembering trauma and facing it head-on is the hardest path forward. It shatters the illusion that the world is safe. But in exchange, it forges real strength — the kind that prepares you for whatever comes next.
