Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in us a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. 

 

By David Griffin Brown and Michelle Barker

Memoir as Cartography

Memoir contains many of the same structures as fiction. The memoirist has an equivalent need to create emotional draw in readers—that quality of a narrative that keeps us engaged, anticipatory, and thus turning pages. But a story from someone’s life doesn’t always hit all the plot points in a typical three-act structure, or it might hit them all, but more than once. In taking events from real life and arranging them in a way that serves the reader’s experience, a memoir must often colour outside the lines. To achieve that, many memoirists turn to theme for their story’s skeleton.

That’s exactly what Helen Knott does in Becoming a Matriarch. Faced with the deaths of her mother and grandmother, Knott must navigate the paradox of becoming: to step into the role of matriarch, she must let go of her preconceived notions about the role and forge her own path. Her goal is not just to honour her matriarchs by filling their shoes, but also to heal intergenerational wounds by blending inherited wisdom with her own experiences. The result is a collection of interconnected stories that all contribute to a thematic thesis.

“I have spent much of my life in circles.”

Knott begins her memoir with an acknowledgement of the record of births in her Dane-zaa maternal line: four generations with four children each. While she follows the “circular maps” handed down to her from her matriarchs, she must also make her own.

In only having one child, she has already created a new map. She is still a mother, and she will still take her place as a matriarch, but the spiral she forges will create new possibilities for her son and for the generations that follow.

A Spiral Structure

In her personal mapmaking, Knott gathers memories, dreams, and stories, and passes them on to us. As she writes, “Ancestral memory is not an instant summoning but a slow process of recalling buried and forgotten things. I have been remembering all my life.”

Knott's memoir is made up of chapters and interludes that move back and forth in time, creating an uneven rhythm of patterns and newness. While lineage is, well, linear, identity is forged in spirals of memory and dreams, circling around the same life lessons until they have been learned.

Herein lies the structural complexity: there is an overarching trajectory as well as shorter anecdotes that contain their own plot—that is to say, with an inciting incident, rising action, transformation, climax, and resolution. While memoirs often deviate from traditional narrative structures, Becoming a Matriarch can be effectively analyzed through the lens of a five-act structure. The five-act structure is an extension of the classic three-act structure, where the second act is divided into three stages.

In Knott's memoir, each act contains its own arc, and within these arcs, we find smaller arcs—stories within stories. This layered approach mirrors the spiral structure of her journey as she circles back to central themes from new angles, reflecting the cyclical nature of healing and personal growth.

What Knott wants (and believes she must do): to step into the role of matriarch after her mother and grandmother die.

What she needs: to figure out who she is first and allow herself to be that person. Allow death to be not just an ending but also a rebirth.

Her misbelief: that she must follow the patterns of her forerunners. That is precisely what holds her back and keeps her from achieving her goal. She sees the role of matriarch as a static pre-existing thing, rather than a fluid and personal identity. Knott can (and must) hold the memory and wisdom of the women who came before, but she must also excavate her own memories and recognize the wisdom that she herself owns.

Act One: Preparing for the Role

Part One: Stasis

In stasis, we learn about a character’s underlying motivation—which will be transformed into a narrative goal with the arrival of the inciting incident.

In the first chapter, Knott takes us into a stasis period—the time before her mother and grandmother’s passing. She is on a road trip with her grandmother Asu and her son, participating in her grandmother’s quest to revisit Dane-zaa territory—a quest that her grandfather couldn’t complete due to failing health.

The chapter takes us through her first arc:

·         Inciting incident: The impetus for the trip. (Goal: to help her grandmother complete a journey that had been previously cut short.)

·         Rising action: Knott is teaching her son what she can so that he too can reconnect to the land and culture.

·         Midpoint: There is a poignant moment when they are basking in a hot spring. Her perception shifts here: “Under Asu’s watchful eye, I was a child again.” Knott sees how much she still has to learn from her grandmother. She takes a mental picture—an addition to her own map—of her son laughing, the rain falling, and the steam coming off the water.

·         Climax: At a diner, their server recognizes her grandmother and says hello. Asu takes the woman’s face in her hands and tells her to pray. It’s a touching moment in which it seems Asu also remembers this woman from somewhere, but afterward she admits she has no idea who she was. This is the teaching that their trip has been building toward.

·         Resolution: Here is the first circle of learning: “We are all our relations,” and at Knott’s stage in life, she is everyone’s auntie.

This arc represents the first bullet point in support of the thematic thesis: Knott is learning to be a matriarch, taking on what lessons she can from those who come before her.

Part Two: Inciting Incident

Knott steps into the role of matriarch when her mother is diagnosed with cancer. Her underlying motivation established in the stasis—to learn what she can from her mother and grandmother; to be everyone’s auntie—is now given sharper form. She must step into a leadership role within her family. At first, she thinks the way forward is to embody her mother’s strength, although “my version of strong had limitations. And my version of strong was going to lead me to some precarious places.”

·         Inciting incident: The diagnosis. (Goal: to leave behind her role as daughter as she steps into her new role as matriarch.)

·         Rising action: Knott’s initial rising action is to resist her goal. Her grief almost leads her back to a cocaine addiction (one of her previous patterns), but instead, she finds herself “seeking temporary comfort from temporary men” in an effort to bury her pain and still project strength.

·         Midpoint reversal: Her counselor suggests that it’s okay to need her mother and to let her mother know that she needs her. She does not need to mirror her mother’s strength. In terms of the overarching structure, this is also Knott’s point of no return. Her mother’s diagnosis gives her the “quest” to become a matriarch, and after her initial resistance, she finally accepts this quest. It is in this conversation with her counselor that she takes her first step forward. However, this is a midpoint reversal because her goal has changed: she has realized that she does not need to leave her role of daughter behind.

·         Climax: When she visits the hospital, her mother is not mentally present following a significant surgery, so she crawls into bed with her and cries. Her mother holds her and wipes away her tears.

·         Resolution: The next day, her mother has showered and is doing much better. Seeing her daughter’s grief gave her renewed motivation to fight.

Giving in to grief, it turns out, isn’t a failure of strength. In seeking her mother’s comfort, Knott helped her feel better. Knott also notes that when she gives in to grief, she is “always resurrected” afterward. Here is the second circle: supressing emotion in an effort to be strong comes with the danger of falling back into harmful patterns. Sometimes, there is more strength in giving in.

Act Two: Making Space

In five-act structure, acts two through four make up the story’s rising action: three significant obstacles the protagonist must overcome on her journey: Knott’s mother’s death, her grandmother’s death, and the loss of her voice.  

While on vacation in Antigua, Guatemala, Knott receives word that her mother’s cancer cell count has spiked, and they are sending her to Mexico for a last-ditch treatment. After Knott flies home, she has a dream in which a fortune teller says that one of her parents is going to die.

·         Inciting incident: Her aunt posts “pray for my sister” on Facebook. (Goal: to tackle all issues in her life simultaneously.)

·         Rising action: Knott is still trying to project strength for those around her. She has speaking engagements to attend for her first memoir, which she’s trying to honour while also arranging a trip to Mexico to be with her mother.

·         Midpoint: She contacts her agent to scale back some of her bookings.

·         Tragic climax: She reaches a breaking point and cancels all her engagements. She cannot tackle everything, everywhere, all at once. This allows her to be with her mother at the end of her life.

·         Resolution: In the past, she would always call her mother before speaking engagements for a dose of bravery in the form of prayer. She realizes it’s time for her to start praying for herself.

In part, becoming a matriarch means learning to live without the strength of her mother. Instead, she needs to hold space for herself. And in making space for herself, she is able to make space for her mother. Here is the third circle: self-reliance is the key to being a better support for her family.

Act Three: Holding Others Up

In this chapter, Knott puts into practice what she learned in Act Two. She must help her grandmother process the death of her daughter, which has exacerbated Asu’s dementia.

·         Inciting incident: In the wake of her mother’s death, Asu is hospitalized for dementia. (Goal: building on earlier lessons, Knot must accept that while she is still a daughter and a granddaughter, she is no longer a child.)

·         Rising action: Knott is still grappling with her impulse to project strength in the face of ongoing hardship. Asu, in the hospital, thinks she’s on trial for something. Knott plays along in order to soothe her grandmother. She also reflects on the stories her grandmother has told her over the years and everything she’s learned from her. At this stage, she is occupying the adult role.

·         Midpoint: In another visit to the hospital, Asu denies being Knott’s real grandmother. This is a difficult delusion for Knott to bear since it negates their connection. At this stage, she reverts to her childhood role.

·         Climax: Later, when she returns to visit, Asu has relinquished her earlier denial. She says, “This is my granddaughter, and she is closer to me than water.”

·         Resolution: Their interconnectedness was never in doubt, but this experience has reinforced the inseparable bond between them, as well as Knott’s need to step fully into adulthood, leaving her childhood roles behind.

Yet again, Knott comes to terms with the challenge of living in a world without her mother, and soon, without Asu. She writes, “I was no longer a girl held up by the women around her. I was a woman who is raised to help with the holding up of others.” Here is the fourth circle: she cannot go on being a child forever. She has to step up and become the adult.

Midpoint Reversal

In a short chapter titled “Transition” right at the halfway point of the book, Grandmother Asu dies, leaving Knott with a huge hole in her life. Up to this point, Knott has been trying to step into the matriarch role as lived by her mother and grandmother—in other words, to speak with their voices. It’s at this point that she must begin to speak for herself—with her own voice.

Act Four: Grief

Following Asu’s death, Knott’s grief manifests in the loss of her voice; she is unable to cry or scream, so she has no outlet for her pain. As she has now lost the voices of her mother and grandmother, her next “quest” is to find her own voice, but this arc contains two smaller arcs, both of which are necessary for her to complete this journey of grief.

Part One: Ceremony

·         Inciting incident: A man Knott is dating says he loves her breathy laugh—another reminder that her voice evades her. (Goal: to regain her voice and her unrestrained laughter; however, to accomplish this, she first needs to come to terms with her grief.)

·         Rising action: Knott reflects on the movie Wind River in which one of the characters needs some form of ceremony to come to terms with his loss. Knott also reflects on how Elders urge people not to cry when someone dies, that crying will delay the person’s passing.

·         Midpoint: In an effort to find her own ceremony, she asks a friend about protocols for cutting off her hair following a death. Her friend says she should wait. Knott asks more people until someone tells her to do whatever she wants.

·         Climax: She cuts off nine inches of her hair and burns it ceremonially.

·         Resolution: She realizes (the fifth circle) that grief isn’t something to spontaneously get over—that it will take perhaps as much time as for her hair to regrow.

Part Two: Flashback to Antigua

·         Inciting incident: Back when Knott was travelling in Guatemala, she came across an advertisement for a healer who helps his clients release sounds that reside in different parts of the body. (Goal: to regain her voice.)

·         Rising action: Knott finds herself alone with this large man in a soundproof room—and afraid. But slowly he reassures her, and she consents to the healing session.

·         Climax: She takes space for herself and wails, letting out “the wild within us pushed down.”

·         Resolution: A year later, Knott reflects on this experience from her voiceless future. And here is the resolution to the lost-voice trajectory: she’s driving alone one day when her inner voice tells her to scream… and she does. The sixth circle has formed: taking space for herself sets her voice free and allows her to speak her truth.

Act Five: Coming Full Circle

Part One: All Is Lost

After Knott’s father watches a video of her presenting a poem about an experience of sexual assault, he calls her, crying, unable to cope with what happened to her. She comments about how the women in her family often have to shoulder such trauma while the men watch from the sidelines—they don’t know what to do with the helplessness they feel.

She begins this section with a demonstrative arc:

·         Inciting incident: A drunk man tries to get into Knott’s car while she’s parked outside a bar. (Goal: to resolve a violent situation.)

·         Rising action: She rolls down her window a bit to try to talk to him, but it’s clear the man is out of control. When she takes his photo with her phone, he goes berserk.

·         Climax: Knott’s friend arrives in her own car and sees what’s going on. They drive to the other side of the parking lot together while screaming at this man, which gets the attention of the bouncers. The man runs away.

·         Resolution: Afterward, Knott’s brother is both furious and devastated that she didn’t call him for help. Circle seven: the men want to solve issues of violence with their own violence. This is a pattern Knott knows well but not one she is willing to accept.

The second arc takes place when visiting a family member in the hospital. After the death of her mother and grandmother, Knott now fully embraces her role as matriarch—but she is still making a fundamental error in assuming the role is preconceived and set in stone. In doing so, she has adopted expectations that don’t actually exist.

Inciting incident: Knott’s brother, lost in a fit of grief, starts yelling at the doctor. (Goal: to resolve a violent situation.)

Rising action: She intervenes and drags her brother outside to cool off.

Climax: He turns his anger on her, and she also reaches a boiling point. They almost come to blows.

Resolution: Knott’s father points out that no one asked her to intervene, which leads her to question what other responsibilities she has assumed that no one actually asked her to take on.

This is Knott’s all-is-lost moment—the point at which she comes closest to failure in her effort to live up to the role of matriarch. It also becomes a pivotal circle for Knott when her father points out that being a matriarch doesn’t mean she must forget herself and give everything to the family.

At last, she gives herself permission to take care of herself, set boundaries, and create space—for others (including the men in her family) and for herself. It is this eighth circle of learning that allows the climax to take place.

Part Two: Transformation and Climax

Knott has reached a point of reflection and synthesis. To dramatize this key moment of climax and transformation, she gives us a symbolic conversation with Death.

All this time, Knott has seen Death as the enemy and has feared it. They have a little chat, and Death sets her straight on a few things. Grief is not the only way to feel close to someone you’ve lost; joy is another way. Maybe Death is something to make friends with rather than to fear.

Death points out that Knott has been trying to live within a preconceived role and holding onto the person she thinks she should be while also holding onto her identity as a daughter and granddaughter—and it clearly isn’t working. What Death suggests is that she should let these ideas die: the role of the matriarch, the protective-mother role, even “Helen the writer.”

This is what the journey has been all about. Instead of depending on love that comes from outside of her, she must give herself permission to center her life on joy and become what she needs to be—whatever that is. The ultimate wisdom she comes away with, the ninth circle, is that she can’t be a matriarch until she first becomes herself.

Part Three: Resolution

The narrative is nearly complete. Knott has grieved the loss of her mother and grandmother. She has lost and regained her voice. The book could end here, but she decides to include one more story that begins in flashback—one that she contemplated not including, but in the end realized it was another significant piece in her journey of becoming.

·         Inciting incident: Tinder connection! (Goal: to find happiness through romance.)

·         Rising action: Knott flashes back to when she fell wildly in love with a military man passing through town. Their initial hurdle involves figuring out how they can change their lives to be together. The second hurdle is that he really wants a kid, so she tries to convince herself to go along with the plan, even though she has memories of being a poor single mom and doesn’t want another kid. The third hurdle is that he’s controlling, making many small criticisms and nagging comments.

·         Tragic climax: She reaches a breaking point and calls him out on his behaviour, after which he breaks up with her via text.

·         Resolution: A year later, she sends him a rage-filled email about everything he did and how it made her feel, including the cowardice of his SMS split. He responds apologetically, they speak on the phone, and though there is no future for them, they reconcile and put the relationship behind them.

When Knott visits her mother’s gravesite, she is finally able to tell her that she has learned how to be happy—and it’s a happiness that comes from inside, not from anything or anyone external. This is the tenth and final circle. She has taken on the strength of her matriarchs but also accepts her vulnerability. She tempers her rage with forgiveness. Most importantly, she has learned that in order to make space for others, she must first take space for herself.

Part Four: The Final Image

The book ends with a lovely final image: she wakes up as a child in her grandparents’ trailer; her Papa is cooking; Grandma smiles and strokes her hair.

“Did you have a good rest, my baby?”

Here is the gold that she keeps in her heart, her source of happiness, the memory of those she has lost, and the love she carries with her. She had made her own map and forged her role as matriarch from a source of inner strength. She can stand strong and tall as an adult while still holding onto the love she felt as a child from the adults around her.

Memoirists and Novelists Unite

At its core, storytelling is about connection. Whether in fiction or memoir, the goal is to draw readers into a world and keep them engaged. Helen Knott's Becoming a Matriarch is a masterful demonstration of the commonalities between a memoir and novel, but also of what makes each form distinct.

One of the key lessons from Knott's work is the power of thematic cohesion. By centering her memoir around the journey of becoming a matriarch, she creates a structural backbone that ties together a series of related stories. This adherence to theme guides the reader through her journey with purpose and clarity.

Knott's interludes serve as bridges that connect and inform the various arcs of her story. These sections provide context, delve into cultural significance, and offer introspection without disrupting the flow. They allow for a fluidity that mirrors the non-linear way we often process memories and emotions.

Another standout element is her willingness to break conventional "rules" of narrative. She opens with exposition, defying the editor’s typical advice to start with immediate action or scene. Yet this choice is intentional and culturally significant. It honours Indigenous storytelling traditions, where establishing lineage and context is paramount. This sets the tone and grounds the reader in her world from the outset.

On a thematic and even visual level, the opening establishes a generational position—like a branch in a family tree—that she believes she must inherit. That it seems predefined and unchanging is a hint about her misbelief.

Knott's memoir is a reminder that structure should serve the story, not constrain it. By thoughtfully choosing how to present her experiences, she has created an emotional resonance that might not have been achieved through a more traditional format.

In blending narrative and personal essay, adhering to and deviating from conventional structures, Knott crafts a memoir that is both intimate and expansive. After all, the most compelling stories stay true to their purpose, even if that means coloring outside the lines.

Grab your copy of Becoming a Matriarch here.

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Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.

David G Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer with over twenty years' experience as an editor. He has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in magazines and literary journals, and he volunteers for the Malahat Review where he interviews writing judges and screens contest entries. He holds a BA in anthropology (UVic) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). As an editor, he pays special attention to structure, relationship arcs, and voice. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018.