What did you do this morning?

Answering that question, your story of it will likely move from A to B — chronologically. This linear type of storytelling is the usual way we speak conversationally.

In memoir, there are several other good options for how a story can be told. These are called memoir formats.

To determine your best format, ask yourself a few questions.

Does my story have a strong enough chronological pull that a reader needs to follow it sequentially?

Does it live more in patterns, images, and accumulated moments?

Are there two key time periods that can inform each other and create story in their juxtaposition?

Can a compelling portion of the story start the book and act as a container to hold its progression, showing my growth journey—the narrative arc?

Here are four common formats with examples for each.

1. Linear

Time order goes from beginning to end. The linear narrative has a natural appeal. It’s familiar, chronological, chapter-driven, with a sustained arc.

Angela’s Ashes — Frank McCourt. A childhood of poverty in Ireland told from inside the boy’s perspective, with almost no adult editorializing. The chronology holds the story.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou. Follows the author from early childhood through adolescence in a sustained, chapter-driven arc. A foundational example of linear coming-of-age memoir.

2. Frame Narrative

A specific scene, situation, or vantage point opens the book and establishes the narrator’s current position. The main story then unfolds as memory or retrospect from inside that frame. The frame often returns at the end, completing the circle. Think of it as a story being told from somewhere — the reader always knows where the narrator is standing as she looks back.

A Long Way Gone — Ishmael Beah. Opens with Beah safe in America as a young man, then reaches back into his harrowing years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The present-tense safety of the frame makes the past all the more devastating to enter.

The Liars’ Club — Mary Karr. Opens on a single destabilizing childhood night that frames everything following as the story of how the family arrived at that moment.

3. Braided Memoir

Two or three separate strands — different time periods, storylines, or themes — woven together throughout the book. The meaning lives in the interweaving, not in any single thread.

Past/present (dual timeline) is good if you’re writing about adult life but want childhood experiences to play a central role. The present is in conversation with the past.

Two time periods in the past, such as with life before an illness and life during it.

Personal story braided with the history of a time period.

Two characters with distinct voices, such as mother and daughter.

H is for Hawk — Helen Macdonald. Braids three strands: training a goshawk in the present, grieving her father’s sudden death, and the parallel story of writer T.H. White, who also trained a hawk decades earlier. Each strand illuminates the others in ways none could achieve alone.

The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion. Braids the immediate present of grief following her husband’s death with memory, research into the nature of grief itself, and the long history of their marriage.

Know My Name — Chanel Miller. Braids the legal proceedings of her assault case with her interior life and recovery. Shows how braiding can hold an emotionally unbearable subject by giving the reader somewhere else to breathe.

4. Vignette Style

A vignette is a short, self-contained piece of prose that captures a single moment, scene, image, or memory with intensity and precision.  It doesn’t summarize or explain — it puts the reader inside a specific moment through sensory detail, dialogue, and image. It trusts the scene to carry the meaning without the narrator spelling it out. It ends not with resolution but with resonance — a final image or line that stays with you when you stop reading.

The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kingston. Fragmented, nonlinear pieces circle a mythologized and withholding mother, building a portrait of identity, culture, and inheritance that no linear telling could achieve. A foundational text of the form.

Hunger — Roxane Gay. Short, compressed chapters accumulate into a portrait of trauma and the body. Each piece stands alone; together they become something larger and more powerful than a single narrative.

The Periodic Table — Primo Levi. Each chapter is a fully self-contained vignette organized around a chemical element, yet together they form a life and a witness to history. An example of how independent pieces build into something greater than their sum.

You may be able to plan ahead for format, or you might discover the best format after writing your first draft. The first draft can show you what you need.

I learned that writing my memoir, Living in the Long Shadow. The book started as a linear narrative. I needed that first draft to explore the story — to find where I wanted it to start and where it needed to end — so I wrote chronologically, covering an eighteen-year period.

When I finished, I knew I wanted to separate the inciting incident into its own narrative thread, divided across all the chapters. At the end, the two timelines would converge: the chronological narrative closing with the future as I saw it at that moment — not the way it would look ten days later, the way the reader already knows by then that it will be.

That gap between what I believed and what the reader knows is coming is the dramatic irony the two timelines made possible. The juxtaposition created an emotional charge the linear draft couldn’t achieve alone, and a charge that mirrors the truth.