Structure

Sarah Polley's memoir is divided into six roughly equal parts. Each part is an essay complete unto itself with a beginning, middle, and end. Each essay deals with a personal trial that very nearly destroys the author but somehow does not. Polley sews her colorful dreams carefully into the fabric of every essay, sometimes opening the essay with a vivid description of a dream as in "Dissolving the Boundaries": "When my third child, Amy, is nine weeks old I have a dream. In the dream I am walking on a beach in Prince Edward Island. Eve, who is six years old at this time, holds my hand. The white sand stretches beyond us into the distance, where the beach melts into soft dunes, long grass growing precariously off the edges and swaying gently in the breeze. The sun is shining, the sky an impossible periwinkle blue. Eve...