Structure

The young adult memoir is 216 pages long with a total of 14 chapters. The chapters are numbered and titled, with a title that references the topic of that particular chapter. There is both an Author’s Note and Introduction at the start of the memoir. Johnson includes the Author’s Note to warn the reader or teacher of the difficult material ahead and how to read aloud some of the offensive words in the memoir. The memoir moves mostly forward in time starting with how the four boys came to grow up together and ending with all of them grown and Nanny dying. However, the time skips around significantly - reflecting more the way someone might remember certain events or moments rather than one day following the next. Each of the chapters follow a particular memory and theme based around that chapter’s Nannyism. Often, though not always...