a past he can reach only through other people's reports

Even Hal's own life reaches him secondhand: lying on the floor reconstructing his childhood, he can't tell his own memories apart from his memories of Mario narrating Mario's memories, so his past arrives routed through a brother the way everything in this family routes through an intermediary. The starkest case is his own famous origin — eating the mold — which he owns no first-person copy of at all; he remembers only Orin telling it. The self can't get to its own history without a third party holding the story. [sweep · shared-ground memory-forgetting]