With regard to the acquisition of someone else's memory through the telling of tales--my great-Aunt's, for example--one of the questions Sonata for Jukebox, and many novelists (and myself) have over the decades been fascinated by, look at is the essence of whether either--the experienced memory, or the remembered telling--is even remembering at all. And the importance not only of what we remember, but what we choose to remember. It is the question of memory itself--whether a favorite song, or other cogent expression of experience--and whether it is simply a reenactment of the original event, or how the mind prefers to be comforted by the sameness of the telling--its created image of the tale, and the controlled response produced.
From a fictional perspective, years ago I accidentally picked up Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat. The novel explores (more often succesfully than not) "the language of inheritance" and the doubling of memory. Breath, was especially compelling in how it explored the doubling of language (in the fragmented English/French/Creole retelling of family history) and how that shapes memory--how the words and language used define the experience of remembering. While imperfect, it is also an exquisite exploration of how human pain is shared and even physically manifested through shared memory, as well as how language shapes what is understood and what is not in the stories that 
we tell each other. And while there is much that can also be said on what Danticat was trying to express with regard to female interactions and the trauma of what men do to women, that was less compelling for me than the novel's creative perspective and telling of family history.
Helen Weinzweig’s novel Basic Black with Pearls asks similar questions, though she looks inward, at the places many of us live in our own minds, and the human need to find meaning in our physical life and our (often mistaken and possibly entirely invented) memory as part of the way people seek healing. Weinzweig's protagonist is even more appealing to me because she is completely unreliable. While we are always at the mercy of the novelist in the stories we read, it is generally a given that when we sink into our chair with a book, the place we are being taken is "real." In Basic Black, however, because the main character is uncertain in her memory, we are entirely at the mercy (as is she) of the reliability of the people she encounters. We learn about her and her memory as she does, by what she is told (about herself and her lover) through the memories and stories of strangers. Many readers recoil from this type of uncertain account, as we would if we were listening to someone who we were unsure was being honest. But, Weinzweig is quite accomplished at playing at the basic human need to hear stories that tell them about themselves, either to reinforce or newly invent, and she is quick to show us that there are only certain stories that the narrator is accepting and, in turn, letting us know about, in order to gain what she seeks--through chosen memory.
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