By almost any measure, the thirteen years I spent writing my memoir, She’s Under Here, was too long. There were reasons: the difficulty of the subject matter, family upheavals, work obligations. The biggest obstacle, though, was that I couldn’t figure out how to tell it.
In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick makes a crucial distinction between “context or circumstance, sometimes the plot”—this is the situation—and the story, “the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”
I had a plot. Decades ago, I’d escaped a man who promised to kill me if I refused to bend to his will. Because of my ex-husband, I’d disappeared. As for what Gornick called “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer,” I did not have a story.
As living beings we each have a beginning, and we will each have an end, and all any of us can do is move forward. A story has a similar trajectory. Its time span may be ordered chronologically or otherwise, decisions about structure that will affect every aspect of the telling, but whether the work covers eons or decades or days, it becomes its own container. In the reader’s experience, engagement begins on page 1 (even if there’s some skipping around) and concludes at The End.