Muddling Memoir: A Timeline

I read the letters, a fragmented conversation between the twenty-something me and the parents I adored and deplored and didn't understand any better than I understood myself. I read and struggle to understand who that me was and why she was unable to accept the love so clearly expressed in her parents' letters.

I am also astonished by all I shared with my distant parents in those letters and equally appalled at how the older me was still unable to comprehend the overtures, gestures, expressions of love my parents showed me. All good fodder for a memoirist. A challenge for a middle-aged woman still curious about lives lived.

I read the letters and match content to journal entries marked with similar dates. Slowly a timeline emerges spanning the years from 1974 to 2009, a timeline far broader than the intended scope of this new memoir. I narrow the frame - 1979 to 1984 - a frame marked by significant events at both ends.

In writing a novel, the writer develops a storyline and plots scenes along a story arc. In some ways, a memoirist follows suit. But first, before I can focus on storyline or choose events (as opposed to creating them) to include or delete to enhance a story arc, I need a timeline. I need to dredge up the details of events, experiences, and emotions now buried for over three decades.

In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, "Some memories - often the best and worst - burn inside us for lifetimes, florid, unforgettable, demanding to be set down." The human brain - or is it the heart? - holds these major events, delightful and dreadful, but the memoirist seeks the details to link those events, the glue to hold them together. Tools at hand are journals, letters, photographs as well as long quiet walks, stacks of old LPs, and if I'm really lucky, reconnections with long lost friends.

One step at a time. Build a timeline. Create a table. Divide it into sections each labeled with a three month time period followed by three boxes: events, people/objects, and scenes. The first section reads "January, February, March 1979." A flexible guide, it is easy to add to or subtract from this table.

One of my father's numerous skills was bricklaying. We, his clan of nine kids, were his brick carriers. "Stack them solid. Wide at the bottom. No cracks lined up. Build up from the base for strength," he told us. The same principal applied to stacking firewood, a solid base with cross sections at the ends to hold the wall of wood together even as we removed logs through the winter.

The lessons of childhood apply to my writing process. The framework for a memoir requires a solid base which in turn demands research and a timeline based on more than the dominant memories that cling and haunt and exact attention.

I am still at this step in the process - the research/timeline building step - and likely will remain here for months. At the same time, I write scenes as memories emerge, scenes that may or may not find their way into the finished memoir, but like my father's bricks, they are scenes that add structure as they dredge up more memories of a life once lived.

Prior posts in this series: 

Muddling Memoir: Beginnings 

Muddling Memoir: Journals 

Muddling Memoir: Letters 

Muddling Memoir: Perspective