MemoryError and Pickle

[Fillmore]

Hi there, Python newbie here.

I am working with large files. For this reason I figured that I would 
capture the large input into a list and serialize it with pickle for 
later (faster) usage.
Everything has worked beautifully until today when the large data (1GB) 
file caused a MemoryError :(

Question for experts: is there a way to refactor this so that data may 
be filled/written/released as the scripts go and avoid the problem?
code below.

Thanks

data = list()
for line in sys.stdin:

     try:
         parts = line.strip().split("\t")
         t = parts[0]
         w = parts[1]
         u = parts[2]



         #let's retain in-memory copy of data
         data.append({"ta": t,
                      "wa": w,
                      "ua": u
         })

     except IndexError:
         print("Problem with line :"+line, file=sys.stderr)
         pass

#time to save data object into a pickle file

fileObject = open(filename,"wb")
pickle.dump(data,fileObject)
fileObject.close()