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“Rightly it is said of utter misery that it ‘cannot be remembered’” writes De Quincey, quoting Coleridge, in Suspiria De Profundis (1845, p. 128). A few pages later he adds,“Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth remembering (p. 142).” Paradoxically, for De Quincey, the things worth remembering usually involve extreme misery.
This unwitting contradiction characterizes De Quincey's lack of self-awareness throughout Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) and Suspiria De Profundis (). Yet however unwitting they were, De Quincey's lapses in self-awareness were not random. Self-awareness failed him whenever his autobiographical intention of understanding himself collided with his inability to acknowledge certain patterns in his life. These patterns — including his tendency to evade responsibility by taking opium and to indulge in forbidden sexual relationships, often of an incestuous nature — played a major, concealed role in shaping his autobiographical writings. His fascination with the structure of the mind and the nature of human motivation suggests an urgent need to comprehend himself. But as a writer De Quincey fails to gain the full comprehension necessary for his autobiographical purposes.
This urge for self-aware comprehension probably grew out of De Quincey's wish to remember and understand his tortured family life. It was a household plagued by illness and premature death, one with an absent father and a chilly, acerbic mother. His father travelled extensively from the time De Quincey was an infant, seeking warm climates for a tubercular condition, coming home to die when De Quincey was seven; De Quincey had so little contact with him that