Brooke Warner’s recent article on managing time in a memoir got me thinking how often I drift out of a scene without noticing. One moment, I’m describing my grandmother’s kitchen at Christmas in 1959, and a line slips in that pulls the reader into 2026. A phrase like “I still love the smell of my grandmother’s gravy” or “looking back now” or “I remember it clearly.” Each one yanks the reader out of the past and into your present-day desk chair.
Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and cohost of the Memoir Nation podcast, names this problem well in a recent piece for Memoir Nation. She points out that memoir has only one legitimate “now,” and it belongs to the scene, not to the writer sitting at the keyboard today. She writes,
“Your memoir is in the past. You embody that version of you—you at age eight, you at age 22, you at age 40. You are no longer the age you are today in your memoir, and therefore any reference to the current moment can be confusing or jarring on the page.”
The moment you narrate from your current vantage point, you break the spell you built for the reader.
Why this matters
A scene works because the reader forgets you are writing it. You built a room, and they walked into it. The instant you say “even today” or “to this day,” you remind them a narrator exists, sitting somewhere far away, decades later, telling them what to think about what they just read.
You do not need to hold their hand that way. Trust the scene. Trust the reader.
What to do instead
Cut the tells. Search your draft for phrases like:
- I still
- Even now
- To this day
- Now I know
- I remember
Most of these can go. The sentence underneath them almost always survives the cut and reads stronger without the crutch.
If you genuinely need to share something your younger self did not know, you have another option. Warner calls it swiveling the camera toward the future instead of jumping to the present. Instead of writing “now I understand my father was scared,” you write “my father was scared, though I would not understand that for another twenty years.” You stay anchored in the past. You gesture forward without breaking the wall between the reader and the scene.
Try this
Open a page of your draft. Find every place you speak from today. Ask what the sentence needs to do. Then rewrite it from inside the scene, staying in the age and the moment you were living then. One “now”, fully inhabited, carries more weight than two.
This post draws on an idea from Brooke Warner’s essay “One Now at a Time,” published on the Memoir Nation Substack.
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