comment on structure

As mentioned previously in this guide, the structure of the story is categorized as a series of flashbacks. In the present tense, the narrator lives with her aging and blind mother in New Hampshire. But the majority of the story is made up of past-tense descriptions of events in her mother's youth. The author structures the story around three main memories that the narrator characterizes as instances for which she owes her mother her life. The first is a storm during a trapeze performance that kills her mother's first husband but spares her mother after she makes the choice to save herself. The second is her parents' meeting in the hospital during her mother's recuperation, culminating in her father teaching her mother how to read. And the third is a memory from the narrator's childhood in which the family's house caught fire and her mother rescued her by catapulting from a tree into the narrator's bedroom window.