Here's what that ordeal actually looks like.
Out the back door of a house, under a big ash tree, there was a picnic table. At the end of summer in 1966, a young writer named John McPhee lay down on it for nearly two weeks. He went inside for lunch. He went inside at night. Otherwise he stayed flat on his back, staring up into the branches, fighting what he later called fear and panic. He'd spent eight months researching the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey for The New Yorker. He'd interviewed fire watchers and cranberry growers and a keeper of a general store. He'd read every book and every scientific paper and a doctoral dissertation. He had assembled enough material to fill a silo. And he had no idea what to do with it. The piece would eventually run to about five thousand sentences. For those two weeks, he couldn't write a single one.
That paralysis is the most honest thing anybody has ever said about structure. McPhee wasn't blocked because he didn't know his subject. He was blocked because knowing your material and knowing its shape are two completely different kinds of knowing — and the second one doesn't arrive just because the first one did. This is the gap every family memoirist falls into, usually right after the research is done. There are the recordings, the photographs, the half-remembered scenes, the silo full of stuff. And the discovery comes that having it all is not the same as knowing where it goes.
So here's the thing worth holding onto before proceeding further. Structure is not a container you pour your story into. It's the shape your story makes once you've figured out what it means. McPhee couldn't find the structure for the Pine Barrens until he understood what he was actually saying about them. And that's the order that matters — the meaning comes first, then the shape follows from it. Which is exactly why the work of finding the narrator, the work of finding the story underneath the situation, all of that had to come before this. The skeleton can't be built until there's clarity about what the body is supposed to do.
McPhee found a way out, and the way he found it is the first useful tool. Years earlier, his high-school English teacher, a woman named Olive McKee, had made her students do three pieces of writing most weeks for three years — and every single one had to come with a structural outline first. Roman numerals, or a looping doodle with arrows and stick figures, it didn't matter. The point was to build a blueprint before working anything out in sentences. So when McPhee was drowning, he thought of Mrs. McKee. He spent half a night sorting his notes into little stacks — some grouped by theme, some by chronology — and arranging them in an order that hung together. He settled on his ending before he went back to the beginning. And then he wrote the thing.
Notice what he actually did there, because it's the whole menu for a family memoir. He sorted his material three ways. By chronology — what happened in what order. By theme — what belongs with what, regardless of when it happened. And by association — what reminds you of what, the way one memory triggers the next. McPhee built a career on associative structures, on finding the surprising adjacency that makes two unrelated things illuminate each other. For a family memoir, those three modes — chronological, thematic, associative — are the raw forces to work with. Almost every structure one will ever use is some combination of them.
Most people, left to themselves, write the first draft chronologically. Born here, grew up there, then this happened, then that. And there's nothing wrong with that as a way to generate material. The writer and editor Allison Williams, who runs a memoir coaching practice and writes as Guerilla Memoir, points out that most writers draft either chronologically or thematically, and both are terrific ways to get a first draft down. The trouble starts when the order things happened gets mistaken for the order they should be told.
So how do you choose? The most useful test comes from Lisa Cooper Ellison, a writer and book coach who's written extensively on this for Jane Friedman's site. She says look at your narrative arc — and by arc she means the chain of events that produces the narrator's inner transformation. At the start, the narrator believes one thing. In the middle, that belief gets tested. By the end, the worldview has shifted. The shape of that transformation tells you the shape of your book.
Take the simplest case first, because the simple case is more powerful than people give it credit for. A linear, chronological memoir — just one thing after another in order. Ellison points to Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, the memoir about growing up with neglectful, chaotic parents. It's told straight, in order, from the child's point of view. And here's the clever part of why that works. By staying inside the child's perspective, Walls hands the emotional labor to the reader. Young Jeannette thinks she's having a wonderful adventure. The reader, watching from above, is terrified for her. The linear form isn't a limitation there — it's the engine. Coming-of-age stories often suit it, partly because a child simply has less of a past to flash back into. There's less material behind them to braid in.
That's the easy part. Here's where it gets more interesting. Sometimes material has two separate stories that won't stop talking to each other — and forcing them into a single timeline would kill what makes them matter. This is the braided structure. Ellison's example is Alex Marzano-Lesnevich's The Fact of a Body, which weaves the narrator's own experience of sexual abuse together with a horrific murder case they encountered as a young lawyer. The book swings back and forth between the two, like the scales of justice, and the meaning lives in the place where they intersect inside the narrator. Neither story alone says what the two of them say together. That's the test for braiding — not "do I have two interesting things," but "does putting them side by side create a third thing that couldn't be created any other way?"
This is the part that trips most people up, so it's worth slowing down on. A lot of beginning memoirists reach for a braided structure because it sounds sophisticated — because a straight chronology feels too simple, too obvious. That's exactly the wrong reason. Braiding two threads that don't genuinely illuminate each other doesn't make a book deeper. It makes it confusing. The structure has to come from the meaning, not from a wish to seem complex. Form serving meaning, never form showing off. If two threads don't generate that third illuminating thing when crossed, there's no braid. There are two books fighting in one manuscript.
Now consider two specific tools from Allison Williams, because they're the most practical things in this whole section. The first she calls the letter e structure. Picture a lowercase e. Start at the crossbar — that little horizontal stroke in the middle — which means opening in a moment of action or a key decision, right in the thick of something. Move forward briefly. Then circle back up and around the top of the e to fill in just enough backstory to explain how you got here. Not a whole life. Just the context for this decision. And then arrive back at the crossbar and keep going forward into the consequences.
Williams gives real examples. Cheryl Strayed's Wild opens with the boot — Strayed loses one hiking boot off the side of a cliff, and her feet are so wrecked she just throws the other one after it. That's the crossbar. You're dropped into the action. Then the book circles back: her mother died, the family splintered, she got into heroin, she decided hiking the Pacific Crest Trail would either change her or kill her. That's the loop of the e, the backstory needed. And then you're back at the trail, moving forward. Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened does the same move — opening on meeting her gynecologist in a Starbucks, then looping back to a weird Texas childhood full of taxidermy. Start in motion, fill in context, return to motion. It's a wonderfully forgiving structure because it solves the most common opening problem, which is starting too early and boring readers with childhood before there's any reason to care.
The second tool is the circular or quest structure. This one's organized around a question or a challenge to keep circling, arriving at a deeper layer each time. Williams is honest about its limits — it's tough for a single-plot book, because a long series of attempts can get tiring. But it works beautifully for voice-driven memoirs, where readers just want to spend time with how the writer writes, or for collage memoirs built from dreamy, prose-poem scenes. Start by naming the central question and then circle it, going deeper with each pass.
And that brings us to the divide that decides everything — and it's the one most useful distinction for a family memoir specifically. Williams splits memoirs into two camps: the quest memoir and the quiet memoir. A quest memoir has obvious external stakes. Climbing a mountain. Beating cancer. Getting sober. These structure themselves, almost, because they come with turning-point decisions and physical setbacks that map cleanly onto a plot. Strayed's hike is a quest. The trail does half the structural work.
But most family memoirs are quiet memoirs. Nobody climbs Everest. Nothing explodes. The change is internal — somebody slowly realizes they're worth more than they were raised to believe, or that they can't forgive a parent, or that they have to. And here's where most quiet family memoirs fall apart. Without an external mountain to climb, the writer assumes nothing's happening, so the prose goes slack. Williams's fix is sharp. Treat the internal change as a dramatic goal the character didn't know they were chasing. As she puts it, "I'm worth more than I thought I was" is a dark goal — and the character moves toward it blindly, while the writer who already knows the ending can invest ordinary moments with the weight they were secretly carrying.
She gives a gorgeous example. A woman leaving a bad relationship has to pack up and go, and it breaks her heart that she can't take her mother's painting. In the moment, it's just a sad detail. But the writer, looking back, knows that was the first real sacrifice — and that the fear of feeling that loss again is partly why she later stayed too long with the next bad man. So the painting becomes a turning point. The flat version spells it all out: I remembered mourning that painting and didn't want the pain again. The alive version doesn't. Williams writes it as one image — the slap on the cheek burning like the poppies in the painting she'd left behind — and lets the reader do the math. Show what happened. Let the reader deduce what it means. That's how to build tension when, on the surface, nothing's happening.
So if someone stopped you right now and asked how to give a quiet family memoir its tension — what would the answer be? Make the invisible change into a goal the character is unknowingly walking toward, and let small moments carry the weight they can now be seen to have had.
The question this section has been circling is the one running underneath the whole course: not what happened, but what it meant — and structure is just the meaning made walkable. Pick the shape that lets your reader feel the transformation, not the one that impresses your writing group.
But there's a quieter argument lurking under all of this, and some of the best family memoirists have made it loudly — that maybe the smooth, satisfying shape is itself a kind of lie. That the broken, fragmentary way memory actually arrives might tell the truth better than any clean arc ever could.