Moving through time is important to revealing meaning in any kind of story. Nonfiction books provide an easier way to make the then-and-now appear. Their chronology is obvious, either marching in a straight line across a calendar, or hanging out shingles that tell readers when something took place.
Fiction, and narrative nonfiction in memoir, demands more. The narrator in such books tells a richer tale when they give us both the sizzle of the moments back-then, along with the comprehension and wisdom of narrating from the present.
Movies and shows get to do flashback, and even flash-forward, using devices like music, changed settings, or even going from color to monochrome. In the old radio shows, a blast of organ music would signal a change.
Mary Karr wrote a memoir that shows off how an author can make these then and now moves. The Liars’ Club shows off her earliest days in Texas, succeeding by writing a deeper moment “from inside the moment,” as she says in her craft book The Art of Memoir.
Going inside a moment is what movies and shows struggle to do. This understanding can surface sometimes in voiceovers. Sven Birkerts says in The Art of Time in Memoir that Karr’s book was a rich memoir because Karr moved readers around “between psychologically differentiated frames of reference: the innocence of outlook and experienced hindsight.”
If you’re working on a memoir, readers want to trust that you’re on the trail of the bigger meaning of your life’s events. You don’t have to assure us everything worked out fine. But we’ll want confidence that you’ll pursue that deeper meaning and show it to us. We’ll live in your remembered, concocted then, if we know the path leads to the wisdom of the now.
Image credit: Mikhail Nilov
