Time Travelling: On Timelines in Memoir
Time Travelling
Amy Turner
“I’m dizzy,” the woman sitting across from me in my first writing workshop exclaimed after I finished reading the opening 15 pages of my memoir aloud to the class.
I flushed with embarrassment and prayed that it had been the vividness of my description of the inciting incident—I was mowed down by a pickup truck in a pedestrian crosswalk—and the dizziness that plagued me for months afterward that had prompted such a visceral response.
No such luck. She smiled sympathetically and, as the class nodded in agreement, explained that she was referring to my memoir’s structure—or lack thereof. As I wrote of the accident and its aftermath, the memoir’s “present and near future,” I drew so many connections to different periods of my past and so often projected into the future that my classmates were being compelled to time travel in three directions at once.
For example, within minutes of being hit by the truck, I lay on the pavement, unable to remember my name. But I did know that the dry cleaners I’d just left would remember me and told the police to ask them. I would always associate the dry cleaners with the day, five years earlier, that I’d unwittingly dropped off a squirrel with my clothes to be dry-cleaned. So, that first draft of my memoir took the reader on a two-page detour about a stealthy rodent. Fifteen minutes—and a couple of pages—later, I panicked as I was being carried on a stretcher to a whirring helicopter that would transport me to a hospital that treats head traumas. For a moment, I considered feigning a psychotic episode, so the EMTs might reconsider a helicopter trip. That took me back even earlier—fifty years before—when my father climbed onto the ledge of his hotel room window and threatened to jump. And just as suddenly, the reader and I fast-forwarded to my fears about my future parenting skills.
No wonder the class was dizzy.
Those digressions—related to character, theme, or backstory—had made sense to me, but unlike my readers, I was intimately familiar with the subject matter. As I wrote, I pictured a page of orchestral sheet music, filled with rows or staffs, each for a particular instrument, all playing simultaneously. My daily life experience—and my writing—felt just like that: Rarely limited to the present, I’m almost always simultaneously thinking about multiple time periods, from the distant past to the far future. But that’s too much work for a reader.
I wish I could say I thought of the solution, but it was my writing coach who had the epiphany: alternate chapters between two storylines—A and B. In a matter of serendipity, the letters worked perfectly: The “A” line would start with the “accident” and cover my recovery and subsequent events, and the “B” line would address the past, starting with “Bronxville,” the village where I grew up.
In theory, the idea sounded easy, but the execution was daunting: rip apart my memoir—at that point 170 pages—and reassemble it.
So, I gathered some of a writer’s most helpful writing tools (aside from the thesaurus): 3×5 colored index cards, various colored highlighters, and a poster-sized sticky note.
I highlighted each scene, sometimes every paragraph on a page, with a different colored marker: green for the A line, yellow for the B line, and pink for reflection. Then I summarized each highlighted section on an index card of the same color. When I was done—and it took a long time—I had a stack of about 60 cards. Now for the reassembling. I taped the index cards—green, yellow, and the occasional pink—in rows from left to right and from top to bottom onto the sticky note poster. The A cards were arranged in chronological order moving forward from the accident. The B line moved forward chronologically from my early childhood. I grouped together cards dealing with the same time period, theme, or character, and new chapters started to form. Stepping back from the poster I’d taped to my refrigerator, the color-coded cards made it obvious if the A or B line was dominating.
Although it would take much more reshuffling of the deck and rewriting transitions to ensure that the alternating chapters are related, the sequence of the cards on the initial poster is pretty close to the memoir’s final structure. When I look at the poster, I like to think that those rows—like the staves on sheet music—together represent an integrated whole that blends the past, present, and future harmoniously.
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Amy Turner’s memoir, On the Ledge, will be published September 6, 2022. She was born in Bronxville, New York and holds a degree in political science from Boston University and a Juris Doctor from New York Law School. After practicing law (rather unhappily) for twenty-two years, she finally found the courage to change careers at forty-eight and become a (very happy) seventh grade social studies teacher. A long time meditator and avid reader who loves to swim and bike, Amy lives in East Hampton, New York, with her husband, Ed, to whom she’s been married for forty years, and their rescue dog, Fred. Amy and Ed have two sons. On the Ledge is Amy’s first book.
ON THE LEDGE
In 1957, when Amy Turner was four years old, her father had to be talked down from a hotel ledge by a priest. The story of his attempted suicide received nationwide press coverage, and he spent months in a psychiatric facility before returning home. From then on, Amy constantly worried about him for reasons she didn’t yet fully understand, triggering a pattern of hypervigilance that would plague her into adulthood.
In 2010, fifty-five years after her father’s attempted suicide, Amy—now a wife, mother, and lawyer-turned-schoolteacher—is convinced she’s dealt with all the psychological reverberations of her childhood. Then she steps into a crosswalk and is mowed down by a pickup truck—an accident that nearly kills her, and that ultimately propels her on a remarkable emotional journey. With the help of Chinese Medicine, Somatic Experiencing, and serendipities that might be attributed to grace, Amy first unravels the trauma of her own brush with death and then, unexpectedly, heals the childhood trauma buried far deeper.
Poignant and intimate, On the Ledge is Amy’s insightful and surprisingly humorous chronicle of coming to terms with herself and her parents as the distinct, vulnerable individuals they are. Perhaps more meaningfully, it offers proof that no matter how far along you are in life, it’s never too late to find yourself.
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Category: On Writing
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