jog memory

First cracking them open at age 10, desperate to know more of the mother she barely remembers, Sunny is baffled at first: “Instead of an ordered index, what Sunny found were traces of a person taking notes, a shorthand, the way some people talk out loud as self-reminder, to jog memory, a memory in which Sunny would never find an active part until she, herself, followed her mother’s shadow and began to try to cook.”