But, again, that's a reason for well-wrought juxtapositions and sudden shifts of tone. They don't always make total sense to the child. That narrator is taking in a lot of different kinds of lessons and experiences from a lot of directions, sometimes simultaneously. It's also partly a child's consciousness in the early part. Yes, you are using multiple identities, and they're coming to you and coming upon you. So it's varied in the same way that your identity becomes varied as the story unfolds. So I realized a kind of neat arc, a clear and obvious chronology-that's not what I want to do, and it's not true to the experience I want to address. This world is a navigation between worlds, and between roles that you inhabit very genuinely and also perform. I kept thinking, what's the narrative voice you need? Then I realized this variety is absolutely a key aspect of the experience: of the different levels of consciousness, and of performance, and of expectation that this world required. But also, I'd be writing these different pieces, and one would be a scene, and one would be an intellectual analysis, and there'd be history, and there'd be a little anecdote. I've actually always written piecemeal, even for my seemingly orderly reviews. How did you develop a way to combine so many forms? It switches between scenes, vignettes, and pieces of dialogue. It shifts from first to third person, and it jumps through to different times from the historical into the personal. The book is very stylistically adventurous. I thought a memoir that blends the cultural and the personal would be the best way to write it. This story, this world, and needing to write about it, came to me. I didn't start thinking, let me write a memoir. I wanted to tell this story, yes, absolutely. So you felt like you had to tell this story? And there was a call on me, emotionally and intellectually. I had really only done varieties of criticism, and I wanted to try something very different that would let me experiment with other kinds of writing, strategies, style. How did you come to deciding to write a memoir after working in so many other forms in your career before that?

Negroland margo jefferson summary