🎧 Listen to Teaching Here

A deep dive on the journey of analyzing a memoir: Value, Structure, Plot

Prefaced by a medical report summarizing her mother’s various hospitalizations, this heartbreaking memoir reconstructs the sad and turbulent events of Lauck’s childhood, which was overshadowed by the illness and early death of her mother. In 1969, five-year-old Lauck stayed with her mother at their home in Carson City, Nev., preparing her mother’s breakfast, helping her get dressed on good days, and basking in the warmth of her mother’s undivided attention while her older brother was at school and her father at work. When her mother’s health continued to decline (among other things, she suffered from a duodenal ulcer and tumors), Lauck’s father was advised to seek better care in California. The move was traumatic, for it separated Lauck from the only home she knew and from her caring, extended family. At her mother’s urging, Lauck told no one at her school of her mother’s illness, fearing the interference of social welfare authorities. After her mother died in 1971, when Lauck was seven, her father quickly remarried, bestowing on his children a classically evil stepmother, and leaving Lauck feeling powerless to complain about her new misery to her often absent father. Lauck’s writing is utterly convincing, although the child narrator’s innocent voice sometimes leaves the reader wondering how her father could have been so blind to his children’s welfare or why their extended family did not step in sooner to help these unhappy children. Lauck, who is now in her 30s, remains true to her child’s eye and keeps the reader sympathetic and engaged. Fans of emotionally powerful books–or anyone who has lost a parent–will find this memoir very satisfying. 

Publisher’s Weekly synopsis of Blackbird from 2000:

In the analysis of a memoir or a novel, the first step it to keep your eye on the primary character or the protagonist. In Blackbird, it is eight year old (above) and I’ve laid the forward moving story on a W chart:

Value

Based on the setup in the first few chapters, the core value (loyalty) can be seen in Jenny’s motivation. Double checking myself, I pull up the Principle’s of Antagonism from Bones of Storytelling.

Blackbird ends with Jenny lying to herself in the final scene when, on a Greyhound bus and shipped to an unknown future, Jenny fantasizes her dead father rescues her—something he didn’t do when alive and with ample opportunity to do so. Why then, would he rescue her in this fantasy? Because she’s caught in self-betrayal. She cannot, will not, face the truth.

Structure

Now I have the core value, I can study the structure of the book I wrote and in doing so, spot a few problems. The most important being that it drags.

 

The inciting incident—the mother’s death needed to happen by pg. 100, but instead I get there at pg. 173 (28 pgs. from the mid-point).

The mid-point (the father’s death) should happen at pg. 200 but is pushed down to pg. 287. It is then on pg. 321 that the stepmother ditches Jenny in the commune but it should have happened between pgs. 200-250.

Interestingly, the climax (Jenny witnessing the birth scene) comes “right on time” on pg. 370 when she lifts above her own “loyalty fog” and the stories she’s telling herself to experience the profound grace of ultimate truth which is that—despite her personal sorrows (and she has many) everyone is interconnected by this powerful love that she feels in the room at that moment new life enters the world before her.

Plot

Now we have value, and we have structure, what is the plot of Blackbird? Initially, I felt sure it was Voyage and Return—Jenny falling down the rabbit hole when the family moves from Nevada to California, but wonder if it strays closer to Rebirth where the protagonist, immature and with limited awareness, falls under the shadow of belief that to survive, she must be loyal, blindly loyal and even betray the truth she knows deep in her soul which is that betrayed by those she was most loyal to.

Rebirth Basic Plot Structure

1.     The vulnerable young Heroine, immature and with limited awareness, falls under the shadow of a dark power. The power may be an external figure, or it may spring from her own personality and enthrall her.

Blackbird: The dark power is the father who places Jenny (immature and with limited awareness) in the impossible position of nurse and caregiver to a dying woman., requiring blind, unquestioning loyalty.

2.     Things go reasonably well for a while. Maybe the threat has receded? But slowly, the poison gets the upper hand.

Blackbird: The mother lives for a long while and seems to be getting better, but then dies, and the dark father breezes past grieving and takes up with a new church and the stepmother saying, “Everything is going to be great!” He is, in fact, betraying his own wife and this is a poison getting the upper hand over Jenny.

3.     Darkness emerges in full force. The Heroine is plunged into total isolation – imprisoned. Blackbird: Jenny, sent to the summer camp, is betrayed by father by his mistrust and diminishment of her and more so when he dies, leaving her under the power of the step-mother.

4.     Nightmare/Crisis – the Heroine seems doomed to a living death. Blackbird: The stepmother abandons Jenny in central LA, leaving her to fend for herself. Jenny gets sick, hears voices, starts losing touch reality.

5.     The Heroine miraculously wakes, liberated through the power of love. The rescuer is often a child representing goodness and light (Tiny Tim), or a figure of the opposite sex, representing the “complete Self.” Blackbird: The birth of the twins (the child representing goodness and light) awakens her to the greatest truth of the human experience—that we are all connected through these moments of birth and beauty.

The problem then is that Jenny doesn’t hold on to her “awakening” but tumbles back into delusion of being rescued by the father who betrayed her. So, in the end it’s rebirth with a tragic downturn.Which then makes me believe that I might have been right the first time, that the plot is Voyage and Return with Jenny leaving the story at the place of shock, like Peter Rabbit.

Here is how that lays out:

1. The death of the mother is the launch, directionless, for Jenny and it is violent and shocking.
2. Life with step mother is puzzling and unfamiliar and yes, identity starts to disappear when she’s abused at the summer camp, continues at the death of father.
3. In Northern Ca. she faces worse and worse situations with collective abuse and rejection
4. Left to fend for herself in Central L.A, she gets sick, hears voices, things getting worse and worse
5. Birth of babies awakens her, then rescued by aunt and uncle and sent back to family in Nevada. She’s circling back to the idea of father as rescuer and then grandfather confirms it.

🤔 Questions to Consider:

Do you agree with the layout of value, structure and plot here? Or do you have other ideas?

What about your own story? Are you able to name the core value and track how it manifests (in your scenes) in the contrary, contradictory and negation of negation line? If you cannot, what’s keeping you from getting there at this time?

Lit Lessons are posts from the ongoing teachings offered here at Blackbird, largely by the teachers, but also by students with something to share about what they’ve learned. Comments welcome and appreciated. If you are a student who would like to publish something on Lit Lessons, please read these guidelines