This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

There is the body, how one lives in that body, how that body helps one perceive the world,

how one forms memories based on those perceptions.

And there are stories, the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves, to process and form and reinforce those memories and perceptions,

and the ones we tell to others, for much the same reasons.

Nan Britton said she told her story to, quote,

make happier conditions for motherhood and childhood in these United States of America.

And she explained in the foreword to her 1927 book, she told it to try to push

forward a cause, the legal and social recognition of all children born out of wedlock.

Her own child, Elizabeth, is pictured on the first page of that book, a studio photograph,

a blonde girl in a white dress, bobbed hair, straight bangs, a strong brow.

She is maybe three years old in the picture.

There is something serious, maybe even wary in her expression, as though she somehow had a sense of the trials that awaited her.

Though of course she couldn't.

But her mother did.

She says so right there in the book

when she writes that she was well aware that, in telling her story,

she would be introducing the none too kindly world to her child.

But she thought the world should know her,

because Elizabeth was the president's daughter.

It was the idea of him at first. In 1910, the year she turned 14, Nan Britain would walk home from school in Marion, Ohio, with her teacher. And she'd listened to Ms. Harding talk about

her older brother. Lots of people talked about him there in Marion. It was a small town.

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