Framing Life

As nonfiction writers, we know that framing this amorphous mess called reality is incredibly hard. What do we include? What do we leave out? Where do we begin? Where do we end? What goes in the middle, and in what order? These are key questions when one is arranging, say, 30 years of one’s life into 300 pages.

In answering these questions, let me first defer to the empress of memoir herself. In her book The Art of Memoir, which consists of 24 chapters, Mary Karr writes only a one-page chapter on the subject of structure. She admits to using the same approach in all three of her memoirs: “I start with a flash forward that shows what’s at stake emotionally for me over the course of a book, then tell the story in a straightforward, linear time.” She concedes that this approach will not work for everyone. Yet we see it quite a bit in other books.

Take Emily Rapp’s , a memoir about, among many things, living with a prosthetic leg. She opens in Korea, where she is traveling as a Fulbright scholar. She is walking along the streets when her prosthetic leg fails. It is hot, she is sweating, and she has to somehow communicate to a street vendor, without a mastery of Korean,