MEMOIR IS USUALLY structured like fiction: roughly linear (either forward or backward), with or without a prologue, and often with an epilogue or afterward. It tells a story with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end. The novel story structure is solid and time-tested and works for any memoir. But what […]
THIS IS THE THIRD of a 3-part analysis of This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff. In this part, we take a look at the narrative structure to better understand how the choice of structure helps or hinders the narrative. Whenever I set out to examine the structure of a piece […]
UNDERSTANDING THE STRUCTURE of a memoir, for me, has always been the most challenging part of analyzing a book — partly because there are so many ways to go about it. Structure can be analyzed by timeline, place, theme, types of events, and so on. In the first lines of West […]
Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction. ~ William Zinsser, On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) I am often […]
What could be simpler to understand than the act of people writing about what they know best, their own lives? But this apparently simple act is anything but simple, for the writer becomes, in the act of writing, both the observing subject and the object of investigation, remembrance, and contemplation. […]
