If New York were a blank slate, how would you fill it in?

“I remember standing at the top of Manhattan and being terrified,” says Becky Cooper, the 25-year-old New York native behind “Map Your Memories,” a project she started in 2009. Cooper hand-printed hundreds of blank maps of Manhattan, each self-addressed and stamped so they could be mailed back to her. Then she and a friend trekked from Marble Hill — the very top of the borough — down to its southernmost point, handing the maps out to strangers with one simple instruction: fill it in with whatever best captures your experience of the city.

A month later, Cooper was flooded with mail: each returned map offering a small, unique self-portrait. One plotted heartbreak sites; another documented a sighting of Salvador Dalí with his pet ocelot. Cooper compiled the maps into a Tumblr page; at around the same time, she started work at The New Yorker as the assistant to Adam Gopnik, who became a mentor and advocate for the project — and who wrote the foreward to a coming book, “Mapping Manhattan.” The book collects both the submitted maps and ones that Cooper commissioned from notable New Yorkers.

Cooper says she was inspired to start the project in part by a 2007 internship at CultureNOW, a nonprofit organization formed after 9/11, where she was tasked with finishing a map of Manhattan’s public art spaces. “I’m really, really bad at geography,” she says. “But I think it helped me to see maps more as biography.”

“Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers,” is set to be published by Abrams Image in April.