Decide Where You’re Standing in Time as You Write Your Memoir

Today’s post is excerpted from Blueprint for a Memoir by Jennie Nash, founder of Author Accelerator.

Two temporal elements—the time frame of the story and where you are standing in time while you tell your tale—are central to the idea of structure in memoir.

But they are tricky to determine because you are still living the life you are writing about in your memoir, and you existed at all the points in time throughout the story you are telling. It’s easy to think that you are just you and the story is just the story, and to believe that you don’t have to make any decisions around time the way a novelist does. But if you neglect to make conscious choices about time, you risk getting tangled up and writing a convoluted story.

The first decision: choose a time frame for your story

What time period will your story cover? Don’t think about flashbacks to your younger self or memories of times gone by; all stories have that kind of backstory and it doesn’t count when answering this question.

Also don’t think about whether you are going to write your story chronologically or present the story in some other way (such as backward or in a braid); these are questions about form that get sorted out later.

For now, just think about what is known as “story present”: the primary period of time that the reader will experience as they are reading the story.

Here are some examples of story present from well-known memoirs:

• The several weeks I spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (Wild by Cheryl Strayed)
• The year I planted my first garden (Second Nature by Michael Pollan)
• The three years I was in an abusive relationship (In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado)
• The three years consumed by the trial of my rapist (Know My Name by Chanel Miller)
• The four years when I was a dominatrix (Whip Smart by Melissa Febos)
• My childhood in Ireland (Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt)
• The 18 years following the accidental death of my high school classmate (Half a Life by Darin Strauss)
• The 30-something years of my marriage (Hourglass by Dani Shapiro)
• My whole life (I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell)

If you find yourself considering a time period that covers your whole life or a big chunk of time like the last two examples in my list, make sure that you actually need to include the entire period of time to effectively tell your story.

Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass doesn’t cover her whole life, but it covers many decades. That’s because her topic is itself time—the way it moves and flows in a long marriage, the impact it has on the relationship. Even her title cues us into this truth: She is making a point about the passage of time. The time frame she uses fits her point.

Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: 17 Brushes with Death, starts in her childhood and covers the entirety of her life up until the moment she is writing the book. It is a beautiful and effective story. But note that the intention of this book is not to tell her life story; it’s to discuss the specific ways that she is mortal and the reality that we are all mortal, and to remind us that every moment is a gift. She imposes a concept onto the material—a form or structure to unify or organize the material so that it’s not just a bunch of things that happened but a very specific and highly curated progression of things that happened. The story presents her whole life, but she only chooses to tell 17 stories. The time frame she uses fits her point as well.

The second decision: where you are standing in time as you tell your tale

While you are thinking about the time frame of your story, you also must decide where you are standing in time when you tell your story. There are two logical choices:

1. Narrating the story as you look back on it

The first option is that the story has already happened, and you are looking back on it with the knowledge and wisdom gained from having lived through those events. You are standing in time at a fixed moment that is not “today” (because today is always changing). It’s a specific day when the story has happened in the past and the future life you are living has not yet happened. This choice has to do with what we call authorial distance, or how far from the story the narrator is standing. In fiction, a first-person point of view often feels closer to the story than a third-person point of view. In memoir, if you are telling the story from a specific day that is just after the events that unfolded, you will be closer to the story than if you were telling the story from a specific day three decades later.

I wrote my breast cancer memoir just months after my treatment had ended and the friend who inspired me to get an (unusually early) mammogram had died. Her recent death was the reason for the story and part of the framing of it. She died young and I did not; the point I was making was about getting an early glimpse at the random and miraculous nature of life—a lesson that most people don’t really metabolize until they are much older. I wanted to preserve the close distance to the events of the story. If I told that story now, I would be telling it with the wisdom of having lived well into middle age—a very different distance from the story and a very different perspective.

I once worked with a client who had been a college admissions officer at an elite private high school. The pressure of the work, the outrageous expectations of the kids and parents, and the whole weight of the dog-eat-dog competitive culture contributed to him having a nervous breakdown. He wrote a memoir in which he answered college application questions from the perspective of a wounded and reflective adult. It was brilliant, and part of its brilliance was the wink and nod of doing something in his forties that so many people do at age seventeen.

We are talking here about authorial distance related to time, but there is also the concept of authorial distance related to self-awareness. I know that sounds a little like an Escher staircase circling back on itself—and it kind of is. The narrator of a memoir (the “you” who is standing at a certain moment in time) has some level of self-awareness about the events and what they mean. One of the reasons that coming-of-age stories are so beloved is that, by definition, the narrator is awakening to themselves and the world for the first time. There is very little distance (temporal or emotional) between who they were and who they became and there is a purity and poignancy to that transformation. It’s as if they are awakening to the very concept of self-awareness.

It is entirely possible for an adult to write a memoir and not bring much self-awareness to what they are writing about; it’s unfortunately quite common. A narrator who is simply reciting what happened—“this happened to me and then this happened and then this other thing happened”— is not exhibiting self-awareness about their life. They are not stepping back emotionally from it, so they don’t have any perspective to offer no matter how far away they are from it in time. They are just telling us what happened. These kinds of stories tend to feel flat and self-absorbed. They make no room for the reader. They don’t offer any sort of reflection or meaning-making, don’t offer any emotional resonance, and don’t ultimately give us the transformation experience we are looking for when we turn to memoir.

Laurel Braitman, author of What Looks Like Bravery, explains it like this: “I tell this to my students now: You can only write at the speed of your own self-awareness. You do not want the reader to have a realization or insight about your life that you haven’t had already or they will lose respect for you.”

If you are telling your story as you are looking back on it, make a clear decision about exactly where you are standing in time and make sure you have enough self-awareness to guide the reader with authority through the events you are recounting.

2. Narrating the story as it unfolds

The second logical option in terms of where the narrator stands in time is to tell the story as though you are experiencing it for the first time. There is no temporal distance from the events you are writing about. You narrate the story as the story unfolds, which means that you narrate it without the knowledge of how it all turned out. In this kind of story, the self-awareness that is necessary for an effective memoir is unfolding as the story unfolds as well.

I wrote a memoir about getting married and the structure of it was a “countdown” to the wedding. In this format, the concept is that events were unfolding as I was living them. This wasn’t technically true—I wrote the book after the wedding had taken place—but I had taken extensive notes and was able to preserve the concept of not knowing how people would behave or how I would feel. (This book embarrasses me now—the whole idea of it. I was 25 when I wrote it, so what can I say? I am grateful for its role in my career and here it is being useful as an example.)

In Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, she wrote about the year after her husband dropped dead at the dinner table, and of the difficulty that the human mind has grasping that kind of catastrophic change. In the first pages of the book, she writes, “It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004. Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock….” What she is doing here is signaling to us that there is not a whole lot of authorial distance or self-awareness to what she is sharing. She is figuring it all out—this tendency to think magical thoughts about the dead not really being dead—as she writes. But the key thing is that she knows that she is figuring it out, and she invites us into the process. She has self-awareness about her own lack of self-awareness. She is not just telling us about the dinner and the table and the call to 911.

In Bomb Shelter, Mary Laura Philpott places her narrator self at a point in time when the story is still unfolding; she has perspective and self-awareness, but those elements are still clearly in flux. The New York Times reviewer Judith Warner called this out in her rave review of the book. Warner said, “I want to say something negative about this book. To be this positive is, I fear, to sound like a nitwit. So, to nitpick: There’s some unevenness to the quality of the sentences in the final chapter. But there’s no fun in pointing that out; Philpott already knows. ‘I’m telling this story now in present tense,’ she writes. ‘I’m still in it, not yet able to shape it from the future’s perspective.’” Like Didion, Philpott was well aware of the choice she made around narration and time, and those choices perfectly serve her story.

Can a narrator stand in two different places in time?

Writers often get into trouble when they try to combine two narrative stances: They write one scene about their childhood with the innocent voice of a young person and then write another scene with the wisdom and jaded voice of their current self. The trouble comes when they don’t do this on purpose; they do it because they haven’t thought about these questions of time. The result is like head-hopping in fiction: When the writer bounces from character to character, the reader has to struggle to follow the emotional thread of the story, and odds are good that they won’t stick around to struggle for long.

Maintaining narrative distance from your childhood self doesn’t mean that you have to give everything away. Your adult self who is the narrator doesn’t have to be a know-it-all. In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy writes about brutal experiences she had as a child actor. The adult McCurdy recalls how she experienced those events and what she felt about them, but she doesn’t give us the conclusion of those events—the realization that her mother was abusive—until later in the book. She tells us what happened when she was a child and why she hated it and how she reacted (she chronicles her descent into disordered eating), but she doesn’t figure out exactly what it all meant until she grows up a bit. So as a reader, we experience this arc of change alongside her. We experience the transformation. What she did not do is give us a child-like experience of the childhood scenes or a flat recitation of the facts.

There are, of course, always exceptions. My book coach Barbara Boyd told me that one of her proudest moments as a coach involved a memoir in which the author, Lorenzo Gomez III, wrote about his experience in middle school using his adolescent point of view and ended each chapter with a letter from his adult self to the adolescent self, using his adult point of view. That book, Tafolla Toro: Three Years of Fear, was turned into a play that high school drama clubs perform. But Gomez did not land on that structure by accident; he made a conscious choice about how to shape his story—and so must you.

As you answer these two questions about time, look back at your why and your point, the super simple version of your story, and your ideal reader. All of those answers will inform your choices about time.

Chronological time versus fractured time

Everything I have written about time, above, has assumed that your memoir is going to be told chronologically. The vast majority of memoirs are stories told in this way. For example:

• Know My Name by Chanel Miller
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed
• Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
• Hunger by Roxane Gay
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Lost and Found by Kathryn Shulz
• Bossypants by Tina Fey
• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Chronological order means that the tale is told from beginning to end the way that it happened in your life. Again, flashbacks and memories don’t count here; including them doesn’t mean that a story isn’t being told chronologically. In a straightforward chronological narrative, there will almost certainly be flashbacks—moments in a narrative when the writer recalls something about their past in order to make sense of what is happening in story present, so they go back in time in order to move forward with more insight—but the story the author is telling still moves through a distinct period of time (story present) in chronological order.

The other thing that doesn’t negate the straightforward chronological structure is the choice to use a flashback as a framing device. In Wild, for example, there is a prologue in which the author has just lost a hiking boot over the side of a canyon, and she throws the other one after it. It’s a scene that appears again about three quarters of the way through the book. Starting her story with that scene sets the stage for what is to come, adds a whole lot of tension, and is a fantastic place to begin. The rest of the story follows Strayed’s preparation for the hike and the hike itself and proceeds in a straightforward chronological way (with a whole lot of flashbacks as Strayed is figuring out her relationship with her mother and to loss and to herself). Despite that prologue, the structure of Wild is still a straightforward chronological narrative.

Choosing a straightforward chronological narrative is a good choice for most memoirs. It’s how we live our lives, after all, and how we tell most stories in real life. There is a naturalness and a comfort to this structure.

But what if you want to tell your story with a timeline that is fractured or deliberately presented out of order? A fractured narrative is different from a story that includes flashbacks because the author leaps around to different time periods and doesn’t “return” to a chronological story present. In a fractured chronology, story present itself is out of order. Story present still exists, because the reader is still experiencing the story within a particular frame, it just doesn’t proceed chronologically.

Sound confusing? It can be. A fractured narrative can be far more difficult to write than a straightforward chronological narrative but, for the right story, it can be a powerful choice to make, especially if you are using fractured time to reflect an experience that was itself somewhat chaotic as you lived it. It gives the reader a sense of being unsettled; although the best fractured narratives also give a sense of safety or authority—we know that the writer is in charge of the journey and taking us on a winding path that will end up where they want us to go. We trust them and we’re happy to follow them. A fractured narrative can also work very well if you are writing about an idea or a concept that permeates a life, like how often we come close to dying (I Am, I Am, I Am) or how a human being copes with the terrible and endless anxiety of loving other people (Bomb Shelter).

My niece Caroline has been teaching herself the art of quilt design. She recently began to design a quilt for a new baby coming into our family. She explained to me that there is a visual language for quilting. Before you get to decide what colors to use, the first consideration for a quilt is the grid: Will it be a traditional grid, a deconstructed (or fractured) grid, or will there be no grid at all (a choice that leads to a freeform style)? Once you decide on the grid, you can decide on scale: Will you zoom way in on your grid to highlight one element of it? Will you zoom way out to show the ebb and flow of the grid? Once those questions are answered, you can finally look at color, and how tone and contrast will function in your quilt.

As she was outlining this visual language, I kept thinking that this process was exactly like the choices surrounding time in memoir. Before you can look at the chapter outline or select the stories you will use to tell your tale, you have to select the underlining structure. If you make the decision to use a fractured chronology, you are choosing to upend the traditional narrative structure in order to tell the story in a way that is less predictable or rigid. Both can result in a pleasing design, but they will have very different underpinnings.

In a story told with a fractured chronology, the narrator is almost always standing in time at the end of the story, looking back at all the events and recalling them in a way that has its own internal logic. A story with a fractured chronology is not random; the writer has deliberately deconstructed the grid and imposed a different kind of order on the disorder.

Two of the books I’ve just mentioned use this tactic: In Bomb Shelter, Mary Laura Philpott is writing about the anxiety and fear she feels as a mother, a wife, a daughter, and a grown-up human, but she begins the story with a scene from her childhood involving stingrays. She then leaps around in time: to that one Christmas when that terrifying thing happened to one of her children, to that time when she was in grade school, to that time when her kids were in grade school, to the time in college when her dad casually mentioned the secret underground bunker that gives the book its name, to that time her child headed off to college himself.

The progression is not in any way random. Mary Laura is a friend, and I had the chance to read an early draft of her manuscript. She was deep in the process of figuring out the order of her stories. Should the story about the terrifying thing (her son’s first epileptic seizure) go first? It’s a dramatic story and a riveting piece of writing. The decision to put it first might have skewed her book to seem like a story about epilepsy, but that was never Mary Laura’s intention. She wanted to write about the larger idea of what it means to be a fragile human who loves other fragile humans, and how difficult it is. Her clarity about her point and purpose—and how each story was serving it—were part of what led her to arrange the stories the way she did. If you are considering writing a fractured chronology, or really any memoir, read this book. The New York Times reviewer whom I quoted earlier called it “genius,” “a masterwork,” and “a spot-on portrait of the complex melancholy of early middle age.”

I Am, I Am, I Am, Maggie O’Farrell’s tale about her 17 brushes with death, does not unfold chronologically. The opening chapter is entitled “Neck (1990).” Chapter 2 is “Lungs (1988).” Later in the book, there is “Cerebellum (1980).” The flow of material from one chapter to the next has its own internal motion separate from chronology. The stories bump up against each other in provocative ways, one sometimes leading to a memory from childhood, another leaping forward in time to a similar scare. There’s something very powerful about this deconstructed presentation: As a reader, we feel unsettled by each event, by the overarching point of the book, and by the way the events are ordered. Everything about it is nerve-racking, and yet that feeling is mitigated by the authority and clarity with which O’Farrell writes. The structure perfectly serves the story.

If you are going to choose to fracture the time in your memoir, make sure you know why you are doing it and consider how you will do it. What will guide you in your choice of how to present the material? You may not have a sense of this yet, which is fine. Sometimes it’s not entirely clear until you start looking at the whole story. But continuing to think about your use of time will eventually lead you to a decision.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to read Blueprint for a Memoir by Jennie Nash.

Jennie Nash

Jennie Nash is the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company that trains, certifies, and supports book coaches so they can help writers do their best work. Jennie’s own clients have landed top agents, six-figure book deals, and spots on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. She is the author of 12 books in 3 genres, including Blueprint for a Book: Build Your Novel from the Inside Out and Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book: Plan and Pitch Your Idea. Visit her at authoraccelerator.com and jennienash.com.