Within popular culture, literature, television, and film, nostalgia is often (if not invariably) associated with childhood. From Proust to Tarkovsky up to modern outputs such as the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things and J. J. Abrams’s Super 8, childhood is presented as the site of boundless adventure and infinite pleasure. But what does it mean to be nostalgic for one’s childhood?  Generally, we tend to respond to this question with recourse to memory and remembering. Yet while nostalgia is often thought of as a variant of remembering, identifying exactly what role memory plays in nostalgia is far from obvious for a number of reasons. In the first case, the past that presents itself in nostalgia is seldom—if indeed ever—the past as it was actually experienced. When I remember something from the past, then, generally speaking, this past is presented as a discrete event that has its basis in a veridical reality. Nostalgia, by contrast, is not motivated by the cognitive recollection of a past that is grounded in a supposedly actual reality. Rather, nostalgia tends to …