Structure

The book’s overall structure reflects its subtitle – it is, as that subtitle suggests, “A Memoir in Essays.” More specifically, the book consists of a series of commentaries, each of which considers an aspect of the book’s central theme, the experience of living in America while black. This structure is arguably different from the structure of most memoirs, in that such works tend to be structured in terms of time – that is, moving through a writer’s life starting with earlier memories and moving from more distant past into the more recent past, and perhaps into the present. In this particular memoir, though, each of the various essays (chapters) considers the author’s life through a lens of idea or experience, rather than through the lens of chronology.

Within each essay/chapter, there is a frequently recurring structural pattern. The author begins with a personal anecdote...