Chap03

Structure isn’t a prefabricated box you cram your story into. It is a flexible framework that helps you move through your narrative without losing your way.

—NANCY LAMB, The Art and Craft of Storytelling: A Comprehensive Guide to Classic Writing Techniques

We humans know innately that good stories have a sequence of action that dramatically leads readers (or listeners) from an opening situation (the occasion of the telling) into a conflict that ultimately has a climax and a resolution. This arrangement of interrelated events is what is called a story’s plot.

No matter how natural happenings may seem on the page, plot and the actions that make it up are always carefully devised and crafted by the writer. Organizing events into a sequence is an essential component of storytelling, something we all do naturally from the time when we’re very young. We tell stories about ourselves, our friends, and our family members, and, if we’re writers, we write them down. Common plots are often repeated—in mysteries, for example, one person wants to get rid of another person and enlists a third person to help. Many memoirs take the protagonist on a hero’s journey from a difficult childhood to a productive adulthood. What makes a plot particular is the way it’s structured, the way the sequence of events is presented to the reader.

Plot and structure differ distinctly and yet work in tandem to give your story its essential texture. Plot has a mechanical aspect, as the narrative has to move forward from its beginning to its end: action rises and falls, and characters’ motives play out through the dance of conflict and motivation. We’ll explore the workings of plot through scene in chapter 4, where you’ll learn how to build the separate blocks that combine to form the plot of your story.

In this chapter we’ll look at structure as the container for the mode and arrangement of the telling that organically allows events to create impact and meaning. While the events in your memoir may share commonalities with others, the form it takes—including decisions about time frames, audience/reader, and ways of telling—is unique and transforms what might have been routine into a standout narrative.

The occasion of the telling is a place to begin observing the interdependence of plot and structure, so we’ll begin our discussion by exploring how the occasion initiates and provides perspective on action.

Memory can act as a sorting device. When something stands out, it’s usually for a reason. Such memories (or, as Lisa Dale Norton calls them, “shimmering images”) act as your story’s catalyst, a precipitating action that sets its world in motion. Most often, the catalyst of the story is referenced in the occasion of the telling, which we discussed in chapter 1.

In the first chapter of Koren Zailckas’s book Fury, the catalyzing incident that motivates her story is her rage at a fellow passenger on an international flight who keeps talking to her even after she has signaled that she wishes to be silent. Zailckas finally erupts in a tirade that plunges the cabin into shocked silence until a baby wakes and begins to howl. The catalyst, in this case an example of the protagonist’s quickly provoked rage, very specifically motivates the ensuing story and illustrates the occasion of the telling.

In Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, the occasion of the telling and the catalyst are even more closely linked. This memoir details a daughter’s struggle to come to terms with her mother’s suicide, which is clear from the first page of the book.

The epigraph for the first chapter, “The Letter,” is an Anne Sexton poem called “Suicide Note”:

I will go now

without old age or disease,

wildly but accurately,

knowing my best route. (3)

This epigraph dramatically points to two things: (1) the eloquent presence of Anne Sexton will shadow every page of this memoir; and (2) her premature leave-taking prompts the daughter’s search that leads to the memoir itself. Notice how few words it takes to do this—the strongest writing is both succinct and resonant of the book’s major themes. The first words of your story establish your subject and introduce your reader to why your narrator and your story matter.

Following this epigraph, Linda Gray Sexton describes finding a letter from her mother that she immediately thinks could be the suicide note that she has long sought. In this instance, the occasion of the telling—the discovery of a long-misplaced letter from her mother—combines with the catalyst that sets the plot in motion.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Let’s pause for a moment to consider how you might apply a catalyst to your own memoir. Take some time now to select one of the occasions of the telling you recorded at the end of chapter 1. Next, write down one or more catalysts that could trigger a specific first scene in your memoir. Don’t censor; write down whatever first comes to you. While these events may not begin your memoir, they may very well be clues to other chapters or significant scenes in the narrative.

While it’s unlikely that your mother was a world-renowned poet, and so you won’t have a snippet of a poem to work epigrammatically, as Sexton does, the occasion of the telling you discovered in chapter 1 nonetheless will provide an entrance and a catalyst that lead you—and your reader—into your story. That’s because dynamic catalysts inevitably lead to conflict. Life doesn’t proceed effortlessly—obstacles get in the way of the most well-planned existence—and neither do stories.

As we’ve noted, many memoirs are about the blockages that occur in childhood as well as in marriages, in careers, and/or with health. From the earliest recorded memoirs, the genre has provided a vehicle for self-discovery and reflection. The plot in memoir therefore inevitably moves from a state of incoherence, lack, or confusion into growth.

In the case of Linda Gray Sexton, the letter from her mother (which turns out not to be a suicide note at all but a letter Sexton wrote to her daughter years before her death) is one of many obstacles to tracing her own emotional history. The poet’s unpredictable behavior—swinging between tender attention and bursts of rage—continually plunges the daughter’s sense of safety and security into doubt during her childhood. Her mother is both beloved subject and source of conflict. This tension repeatedly creates barriers to Linda Gray Sexton’s maturation.

Sexton begins chapter 2, “In Exile,” with the following: “My story as a daughter and my mother’s story as a mother begins in a Boston suburb, back in the 1950s, when I was exiled from my childhood home to make room for someone else: Mother’s mental illness, which lived among us like a fifth person” (11). Throughout this memoir, the writer uses her mother’s poetic gift as “evidence” of both her genius and her precarious mental state. Anne Sexton’s poems are thus woven into the narrative just as her moods and behavior shaped her daughter’s perceptions. The occasion of the telling and the catalyst for the memoir combine in the mother’s words.

In Tobias Wolff’s award-winning memoir This Boy’s Life, the opening words are: “Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide.” While Wolff and his mother wait for the engine to cool, a truck careens past them. “‘Oh, Toby,’ my mother said, ‘he’s lost his brakes’” (3). The stalled car and out-of-control truck are both metaphors for the mother and son’s wandering life. Fleeing from a man she doesn’t trust, the mother too has lost her brakes, and the two drift in the following pages through Utah and on to Seattle in search of a more stable life.

While in this memoir the occasion marks a moment of standing still, the racing truck on its way to crash over the guardrail strikes an ominous note for the reader. We know there are crashes to come for these two characters, that the time spent waiting for the boiling radiator to cool is brief. The juxtaposition of these two events catalyzes the narrative, setting up the pattern of stalling out and then running. The mother’s remarriage in Seattle to an abusive husband appears to stop this pattern, yet the experiencing narrator must distance himself from both of these people to find the space to grow up. Taking control of his life remains Wolff’s task, which the opening of the memoir previews.

As these examples reveal, the central issues of your story, including the main conflicts, determine structural considerations. To help you see how this works, we’ll look at six common structures in detail.

As we explore some of the ways memoirs might be structured, please keep in mind that the structural labels we’ve applied to various works are not exact; many books are combinations of different approaches, which we’ll point out as we go along. Think of structure as a sturdy surround that contains narrative bits of different sizes and shapes—as a tough sac that holds and smoothes the bumpy edges of narrative. As we proceed, we’ll also point out some of the advantages and limitations of each structure in the context of our examples.

Many memoirs begin with a preface or introduction in the remembering narrator’s voice. This allows the reader to learn the occasion of the telling, to discover why this story is being revisited now. After this preface, the structure of the larger work will emerge. An example is The Glass Castle, in which, after an opening closer to the narrator’s present, the structure reverts to a chronological one, starting with the narrator’s childhood and ending at a time closer to that of the beginning. It may be helpful to think of a preface as a way for the remembering narrator to introduce the experiencing narrator.

As with The Glass Castle, Patti Smith’s Just Kids opens with a remembering narrator who establishes the occasion of the telling. Smith begins with her dear friend Robert Mapplethorpe’s death, the catalyst for her story. After this sad and lyrical opening, Smith goes back to her own birth in 1946 and early childhood, along the way establishing that Robert also was born in that year. In this way, she connects the “just kids” of the title even before they knew each other.

As the book is both a testament to a friendship as well as a history of a time, the chronological structure—moving primarily from the friends’ meeting in 1967 until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989—serves Smith well. Structure should always support meaning, and, in this case, the chronological structure serves the book’s larger meaning.

With that in mind, it’s useful to look at what Smith and her book gain from the structure she chooses. One of her motives in writing the book was to show how she and Robert supported each other emotionally and artistically through late adolescence into adulthood: “I told him that I would continue our work, our collaboration, for as long as I lived. Will you write our story? Do you want me to? You have to he said no one but you can write it. I will do it, I promised” (287). Smith constructs her tale so that we see these near twin spirits intertwining around each other, through time as well as space, from the moment of their meeting. By the end of the book, the reader feels that their meeting was preordained: Patti Smith could not have become the artist she became, nor Robert Mapplethorpe a photographer of renown, without their connection. The chronological structure reinforces both this necessity and their magic together. Structure should always reinforce meaning.

Along with determining what the writer gains from a chronological structure, we also want to posit some of the limitations such a straightforward structure can impose. Following a strictly linear time line can limit the interaction of the two yous that is so important to a resonant memoir. If the reader is in each moment with the narrator, imagining the future (even if it’s known, as it is in a book about celebrities, like Just Kids) can feel out of place.

In the case of Just Kids, however, the preface and an extended group of poems and photos that form the epilogue have provided Smith a grand palette, one with ample space in which to explore her subjects. She doesn’t let her roughly linear time frame limit her; rather, she uses it to let the reader peer into the funhouse mirror of a storied time in art and rock-and-roll history.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Because we experience time sequentially, a chronological structure is a good one to try out first. Beginning with the catalyst that you noted earlier in this chapter, list in chronological order what will happen in your memoir.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s subject is her response to her husband’s death, and her plot is the sequence of events she undergoes: first, the death of her husband as she’s preparing dinner; next, her immediate reaction of calling an ambulance, witnessing the EMTs’ arrival, going to the hospital, and so on. But, rather than proceeding chronologically, as the examples above do, Didion’s book moves forward and backward not only through this year of magical thinking, a time when Didion not only tries to trick time into returning her husband but also deals with the severe illness of her adult only child, but also through their life together and her imaginings of what’s next—the future. Didion thus employs a circular structure to weave her memoir into a cohesive whole, returning repeatedly to the moment when everything changed, making it her memoir’s anchor.

Because John’s death has changed everything, Didion must return over and over again to the opening image of life changing in a moment, of the two of them talking as she fixes his drink and then his dying, before she can go forward into new events. Similar to a walker in the Chartres labyrinth, Didion can follow other paths, but eventually they lead her back to the center, to the instigating event that catalyzed her journey.

The advantages of circularity in this book are many. First, the structure underscores Didion’s struggle to comprehend her husband’s death. Often, when we are shocked, we keep going back to the moment when everything changed. In Didion’s case, she repeatedly circles back to the occasion of the telling, the sudden death itself.

Second, this structure forces the reader to experience Didion’s psychological reality with her by returning to key images, compelling us to try and find meaning in this event along with her. As in the labyrinth image above, circularity takes us to our own heart as well as the story’s heart.

Third, in keeping with the book’s title, the remembering narrator’s circling back encapsulates the year of magical thinking. The structure reinforces the uniqueness of this span of time. The narrator and her mode of telling keep underscoring that this time is unlike any other.

While Didion could have chosen any number of ways to tell this story, a circular structure forces her to keep digging deeper, burrowing into the emotional center of her loss. Once we’ve read the story this way, we find it hard to imagine this story told any other way—a key sign that the structure is organic, that it is right. Didion’s circular structure metaphorically represents her own circling efforts to come to grips with John’s death during the year the book covers, because the best structures work on more than one level.

The circular structure interweaves the two yous more often than a chronological structure, which often begins with the remembering self but then continues with only the experiencing one, so a circular structure demands a solid command of both your material and your intentions for your memoir. Even a writer as skilled as Joan Didion required the narrative distance of a number of years before she could successfully navigate these waters. One can easily imagine her sitting at her desk, her various forays into comprehending the incomprehensible spread out around her. It is Didion’s anchor—the moment when everything changed—that keeps her circular structure from becoming similarly incomprehensible.

A circular structure’s anchor does not have to be its catalyst—although it can be. In A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister, Julie Mars goes to a different church every Sunday, providing a narrative anchor. In Heaven’s Coast, Mark Doty often goes for walks, which in turn provide catalysts for his associative wanderings. It’s important to bear in mind that attempting such a structure requires a command of narrative and associative skills that not many writers possess. Still, if this structure appeals to you, it can be well worth the effort.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading and writing: The best circularly structured memoirs work because they have a narrative anchor—a touchstone that the remembering narrator (and by association the reader) returns to throughout the story. For such a grounding incident or image to work, it must be powerful enough to support a circular narrative, have larger metaphoric resonance, and have the associative strength to engage your reader. Consider the catalyst you noted at the beginning of this chapter. Is there a touchstone within it? It may not be obvious at first look. Touchstones can be anything from a spot on a wall to the sound of thunder. List some possible touchstones for your own memoir, and if one provides some immediate resonance for you, keep going and see where it takes you. See if you can successfully circle back to it and if it retains its sensuous aura when you do.

Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, whose catalyst—the death of a beloved partner—is similar to Didion’s, employs a different structure. Doty’s plot proceeds through scenes that move backward and forward from the moment his partner, Wally, is diagnosed with AIDS. Doty, a poet, often connects these moments through strong images, with one image or sequence leading the writer to another. Doty’s memoir is told through association, where one event or memory stimulates another.

Chapter titles in this memoir also evoke this structure: for example, “A Shore Walk” is followed by “House Finches” and then “Dancing.” The chapter titled “Refuge” begins with “We bought a cabin in the woods—a camp, in Vermont parlance” (162). The next chapter, “Refuge (2),” starts with “Provincetown, 1990” (173). The details of living in one place lead the writer (and reader) associatively to another place. An advantage of an associative structure is the strong emotional connection writer and reader share when moving from one part of the narrative to another. Chronology isn’t the point; the sense of story is. As memory itself is associative, it’s not surprising that many memoirs are told this way. For example, a person at a funeral immediately thinks of the last time he or she lost a loved one.

In contrast to Didion’s experience, in this instance the death occurs not suddenly but over a period of years, allowing the writer to document the progression of Wally’s illness and how it changes both Mark’s and Wally’s lives. The occasion of the death and the lead-up to it spark memories of specific houses as well as the places and friends that marked their life together.

Doty’s command of associative reflection results in a powerful meditation on mortality and how it illuminates life along with the specific details surrounding the narrator and his partner as they face this challenge. Heaven’s Coast’s metaphysical dimensions emerge strongly and poetically within this imagistic structure. The memories and events acquire momentum through this associational accretion of detail.

We call the deepening of meaning through juxtaposing events and images that reinforce each other scaffolding. Just as a building is much more than the sum of its rooms, a story’s total impact exceeds the effect of any single event or image. Your structure benefits from scaffolding in several ways. One is that the meaning becomes implicit as well as explicit as the writer—and the reader—create resonance by juxtaposing various telling details, narrative lines of action, and images. Another is the connection created with readers through association: even though it is the author’s story, readers make it their own via identification with the imagery and emotion the author shares. The associative structure allows the reader to experience and, in a way, build the narrative with the experiencing narrator. It’s a powerful tool.

Doty’s choice of structure allows him to create a sense of his and Wally’s life together over time. Underpinning the story are the things that ground us: walks (as noted earlier), nature, places the two lived together, people they knew. Through these and other associative links, the reader comes to feel the length and quality of a long relationship and its particularity.

Association is a common memoir structure; it seems natural, as in life some things, people, and events do remind us of others and become the fabric of memory. There is always a danger that the reader may occasionally be lost: When did that happen? How did that event trigger something else? However, texture and quality, a sense of felt life, are the rewards in such a structure, and Doty’s memoir is rich, rewarding reading.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Associating memories with a place or a time period allows us to begin to develop a sense of interlocking events, in turn leading us to plot. Draw a time line on a piece of paper and begin to insert key places and occurrences. Do some notations connect to others or associate with other times in your life? Alternatively, if you’re a spatial person, set up physical markers in a room that represent key events. As you move from one marker to another, see if you can come up with a gesture that expresses it. Do you walk more quickly or slowly to certain events? That body response helps you create rhythm in your narrative and gives you clues about where you’d like to augment the details.

A structure related to the associative structure is one we’ll call collage, where episodes (usually very short ones) are “pasted up” against other episodes. An example is Abigail Thomas’s memoir Safekeeping, in which vignettes from her life in the 1960s on are presented in very short chapters. Many chapters are less than one page, as in, for example, “My Name,” which is just three sentences long: “You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put in those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life” (165).

Thomas’s snapshots have titles like “To Keep Him Company,” “Insomnia,” and “Skipping Stones.” Several involve conversations with Thomas’s sister. The moments of each chapter are distilled and acute. Together they indeed represent a life, as the subtitle of the book indicates: “some true stories from a life.” Some of the chapters are first person, some third, and occasionally the reader is knit into the narrator with “you,” the address of the second person. The writer’s life emerges in much the same way that we make sense of a photograph album—specific images reach out from the neutral background to capture our attention. The result is imagistic, poignant or funny or quizzical, the fragments cohering into a whole.

Reader participation is an advantage of the collage structure—the short episodes leave gaps in the narrative for the reader to fill. As each sequence is satisfying and complete, readers could choose to read the chapters out of sequence, further creating their own narratives. The brevity of the episodes adds to their power, their punch. Readers who prefer to be lost in a continuous narrative may find this approach less satisfying, as the gaps make them aware that they are reading. In other words, the collage structure disrupts their sense of what a “story” is. For readers who like the challenge of cocreating the work, however, the collage structure is enticing.

Some memoirs employ elements of a collage structure in their use of images, lengthy epigraphs, and stories that serve as forewords or preludes to chapters. Such a book is Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace. While told associatively, the sections represent parts of the memory palace of the title. For example, a discourse called “The Year of the Horse” is followed by a Bedouin quotation, “ Thou shall fly without wings, and conquer without any sword. Oh, horse…” (141), followed by a chapter heading, “Death, the Rider,” and a photograph of what appears to be an ancient frieze. And then the narrative resumes. These juxtapositions, including the illustrations, present a gloss on the text for those who wish to linger. Other readers may glance at these and immerse themselves more fully in the story. Again, the choice is the reader’s.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Imagine your story as a collection of objects. List the objects, then describe the textures and qualities of these objects in a notebook. Alternatively, think of a key event in your life and try to envision it as a series of photographs. What is the quality of the light in the images? What is the overall mood or tone of the pictures? The sensory details you’ll record in this exercise will help you to create strong physical/textural details in your story.

While by its very nature the memoir form makes us aware of a writer in the present looking back, some writers accentuate the gaps in time by using a historical plot or someone else who lived in the past as juxtaposition for their own story. This type of structure adds complexity and dramatizes the two yous vividly. A variation of this form in staged solo performance is called auto/biography, an intersection between “the autobiographical self of the writer-performer” with “the biographical record of the historical personage” (Miller, Taylor, and Carver, Voices Made Flesh, 7).

In a parallel structure, the historical story juxtaposes another’s journey against the present narrator’s in an effort to create a parallel plot that enhances both lives. Such a memoir is Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak by Joan Weimer, which tells the story of Weimer’s debilitating back surgery and recovery against that of the nineteenth-century American writer (and grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper) Constance Fenimore Woolson, who lived part of her life abroad. Mystery surrounded Woolson’s life, particularly her relationship with Henry James. Her death after she fell from a window in Venice prompted speculation about whether the fall was accidental or suicide.

Weimer’s back injury forces her to change and rediscover the parts of her self that have been overshadowed by her successful academic career: “Probably I’d had good reasons for shoving them into a cage and hiding it in a dark corner. But now I’d need to release those ghostly selves, to brush aside the cobwebs and open that cage. To my astonishment, I’d find the key to its rusted lock in the hands of Constance Fenimore Woolson” (9).

Speculating about Woolson’s motives for her writing, her travels, and her relationship with James allows Weimer to uncover buried stories of her own past. Julie Powell accomplishes a similar excavation in her best-selling memoir, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, her journey to becoming an accomplished cook through the recipes, and life, of Julia Child.

This structure bestows a double consequence on the story, as two lives are intertwined. The past gives the present ballast as well, underscoring parallels that provide insight into the writer’s own story. Readers often appreciate the historical detail, enjoying the opportunity to see their present world through the prism of the past.

Perhaps the greatest challenges of the parallel structure are, first, transforming research about the past into dramatic scenes and, second, the danger that the reader might get more immersed in the historical life than the present one. The historic details may appear richer or more intriguing because they are less familiar, less pedestrian than our own lives seem to be when we’re living them, and writers can often imagine the lives of others more dramatically than they can their own. The writer who uses a parallel structure must balance the two stories, making sure that the historical plot provides a gloss on the life of the memoir writer and promotes understanding of his or her story.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading and writing: Joan Weimer was already researching the life of Constance Fenimore Woolson when her back problems began, but using Woolson’s life as a vehicle for mirroring Weimer’s own difficulties occurred to her only over time. Nonetheless, we are drawn to certain historical characters because something about their lives resonates for us. The two of us, for example, return again and again to the life and work of Katherine Anne Porter, a writer born in challenging circumstances who transformed herself into a woman of letters, as we make sense of our own lives as writers.

Are there people from the past whose lives fascinate you? They don’t necessarily need to be public figures—our own ancestors can provide keys to current dilemmas in our own lives. Take a moment to make a list of historical people by whom you’re intrigued. If one seems to provide particular resonance, make a note of that, too, and, if you wish, write a few paragraphs to see where that person takes you.

Weimer’s memoir does not “solve” the mysteries surrounding Woolson’s life. Rather, it draws wisdom from a woman’s struggle to be an artist in an earlier time, underscoring the particularities of Weimer’s own personal journey as well as its gifts and conflicts.

By now it’s clear that there are many possibilities for structuring your memoir. Our selections are not exhaustive, as, really, only the imagination limits the containers we can use for our stories. We’ll consider one last one here, that of the locational structure, which uses landscape or setting as grounding for the interior passage. Elizabeth Gilbert organizes her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love in this way; as her subtitle states, her work is “one woman’s search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia.”

While Gilbert’s memoir takes the reader on a far and free-ranging quest for love and experience in foreign lands, another memoir using this structure, Julie Mars’s A Month of Sundays, is subtitled Searching for the Spirit and My Sister and takes a different tack. After caring for her sister, Shirley, who dies of pancreatic cancer, for seven months, Mars goes in search of spiritual meaning. Her book takes place over thirty-one weeks, during which she goes to a different church or spiritual center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or upstate New York every Sunday. Mars describes her task and her method in her preface: “I will go to church every Sunday for thirty-one weeks, a month of Sundays. I will dress up and arrive a half hour early to take a picture with Shirley’s simple camera…. I will enter the church five minutes early and sit somewhere in the middle. I will open myself to the spirit” (xvi).

Mars’s structure allows her to proceed in a manner similar to either the associative structure or the collage structure we discussed earlier. Mars, however, uses each location as a stepping-off point for reminiscences of her past, of Shirley’s illness and funeral, of Mars’s own spiritual awakening. Often during a chapter one or more days are highlighted with a subhead like “Friday” or “Thursday.” Mars uses these weekday events before she visits a specific church as associative springboards.

Landscape has always been a powerful motivator for memoir—consider Gretel Erlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, to name but two. We organize our lives around the places we’ve lived or in which we wish we’d lived, around moves in childhood or adulthood, around places we’ve visited, or around rooms in other people’s houses. Our bodies in space provide much of our sensory stimulation and mark the crucial passages we’ve negotiated. It makes sense that such sensory moments might provide the catalysts from which we begin our memoir.

The strength of a locational structure is that it’s immediately evocative, as details of place underpin experience or overlie comprehension. Because our brains locate or isolate details to make sense of what’s happening to us, this structure is particularly powerful for a reader. It demands sensory detail in setting scene, an essential skill that we’ll detail further in chapter 5. The sudden shifts in locations can interrupt a narrative, but for a skilled memoirist, this too can add to the pleasure readers find as they unravel the weaving of the story’s separate strands.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading and writing: Often, when we say “place,” we think of larger places—houses, cities, office buildings, and the like. But “place” encompasses smaller places, too—your childhood room, for example, or the restaurant where you meet friends each week.

Do the places in your life organize themselves into some cohesive theme, like Mars’s places of worship or Gilbert’s three countries that begin with the letter I? Are there commonalities among the places you’ve lived, the rooms where you’ve spent a lot of time, or are there patterns to your movement to or away from them? Make a list of places, large or small, that have figured in your life. Then draw some lines between them, not limiting yourself to obvious, immediate connections like chronology but instead thinking associatively. Write the association that precipitated the connection on the line itself. (Use a different color, if you like.) Play with these places, trying to imagine a memoir that uses them as its structure.

One of the most frequent concerns we hear from those contemplating writing a memoir is that the story the author wants to tell is overwhelming. Considering structure not only addresses this dilemma but also helps you move past it.

The best structure for your story is one that allows your narrative to flow organically, providing a flexibility that will allow your story to breathe while at the same time establishing constraints that sufficiently focus it. The central issues of your story, including the main conflicts, determine its structure.

In this early stage of imagining the shape of your story, we find that it’s helpful to think about the impact on the reader you’d ideally like your memoir to have. Consider these questions carefully:

• Do you want your audience foremost to learn about the qualities of a place, a person, or a time?

• Do you want to persuade the reader of a particular point of view or moral position about your subject?

• Do you want, like many first-person narrators of fiction, to explore the motivations and the causality of actions taken during a critical period of your life?

There is no correct answer to the state of mind or feeling you’d like the reader to experience, but a clear sense of what you’d like to achieve will aid you in making narrative decisions. As we’ve often told our students, no one story can accomplish everything. Some key chapters in our lives are so complex that to really represent them would require several books. Your job is to zero in on your intentions for this one project via your desire to take your reader on this particular journey with you.

We believe that one of the reasons we write memoirs is to explore who we were at the stage in our lives we are writing about. One of the paradoxes of writing a memoir is that through the act of burrowing deeply into the past, we come to better understand where we are now and how we got there. In a sense, writing a memoir is an act of identity construction and reconstruction.

Writing the memoir is one way of learning what was previously unknowable about ourselves while at the same time giving ourselves the luxury of exploring this in the company of a witness, the reader. As Vivian Gornick notes, “When Rousseau observes, ‘I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists,’ he is saying to the reader, ‘I will go in search of it in your presence…and together we’ll see what it exemplifies’” (92).

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: A good place to begin your consideration of what structure might work for you is with an informal list of what you hope your audience will take away from your memoir. Mention ideas as well as feelings. For example, do you hope that a story about a dear friend’s illness will prompt the reader to discover the gifts as well as the tolls of the illness? This list will point you not only toward events you’ll want to include but also, more importantly, toward the aspects of the self you wish to reveal in this project.

Your list of what you want to explore with your audience and what you hope they will take away with them through reading your memoir will help you clarify your motives in writing. These motives naturally lead to conflicts or blockages—the things that arrested you or stood in your way, as we discussed early in the chapter. It is the nature of these conflicts that leads to structural decisions.

As we mentioned in chapter 1, people read memoirs to immerse themselves in the details of another person’s life. Thus we read Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings or Oscar Hijuelos’s Thoughts without Cigarettes to experience the individual paths each of these writers followed to become artists. We expect the course of these lives to be unpredictable and messy and hopefully touched with grace, just as our own lives are. But we continue to read in order to inhabit the world of another, in all its richness and startling detail. World creation brings us back to structure and how we can create a shape for the world we wish to share.

For many writers, capturing a sense of the time and place in which they grew up drives their desire to create a memoir. Sharman Apt Russell’s Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist, for example, is so grounded in southwestern New Mexico that she includes a map at the beginning of the book. Her occasion of the telling highlights the importance of geography: “My title…comes from the Quaker phrase ‘to stand in the Light,’ a concept with many meanings, encompassing political beliefs as well as spiritual. In my case, it is very much related to the bright New Mexico sky…. [P]antheism is a word whose back I ride like a man on a horse trying to get somewhere. Or maybe a word more like a house, a place of shelter when it is cold and rainy, a house with big windows and a gorgeous view” (xiv).

As we mentioned in chapter 2, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, grounded in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania, also excels at world creation. Dillard accomplishes a stunning weave of the internal life of her young self growing up in the 1950s with the physical manifestations of trees, rivers, and the topography of her neighborhood. She is a master at creating the emblematic moment that stands for an emotional realization as well. When she describes, for example, the simple joy of childhood, of racing full tilt down a city street for the pure pleasure of it, she gives us details so that we experience it, too. We see her running and flapping her arms down the sidewalk, feel the pulse of blood in our arms. When at last a fellow pedestrian acknowledges her animal spirits and smiles, Dillard captures the image of their meeting simply but eloquently: “So we passed on the sidewalk—a beautifully upright woman walking in her tan linen suit, a kid running and flapping her arms—we passed on the sidewalk with a look of accomplices who share a humor just beyond irony. What’s a heart for?” (109).

FURTHER SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Reading: Which of the structures presented in this chapter allow you, given your subject matter and/or the occasion of the telling, the most possibilities for discovery?

Writing: Choose one structure and sketch out what it might allow you to reveal. Are there disadvantages to this structure that you can see? Is it restrictive in any way? How?

Reading and writing: Write down the qualities you enjoy most in a narrative. Choose one of the memoirs discussed in this chapter that has some of those qualities. How does its structure contribute to your reading enjoyment?

As you review the examples of structures covered above, the degree of reader participation as well as the imperatives of the occasion of the telling will lead you to consider a particular one—associative, perhaps, or circular, for example, if your goal is to meditate upon a time. Along the way, you’ll open yourself to a deeper understanding of the you that you were then and how it shaped the you that you have become.

The kind of world you want to create and share with your reader leads you to the container that best holds your story. In chapter 4 we’ll delve into the workings of scene and how to transform particular events into detailed, dramatic, and vivid moments in your memoir.