Structure

For the most part, this book does not follow what might be described as conventional structure: that is, beginning-middle-end, following a line of action that, in conventional narratives, would build to a climax. There is a broad strokes sense of chronology, of events being described in roughly the order in which they occurred: the narrative moves from the author’s experiences of childhood, through his experiences of adolescence, and into his experiences of young-adulthood. In terms of the construction of any kind of plot or straightforward through-line, though, there generally is not one. Instead, the narrative is primarily anecdotal, or episodic, consisting primarily of memoir-like narrations of particular incident that are given a degree of context and occasionally contain narrative and thematic echoes of other such incidents. If there is anything approaching a through-line, it is the author’s exploration of his family’s relationship with the...