By Heidi Croot
Prologues and first chapters are such prima donnas. All the attention flows their way. They even get their own acronym, coined by author Allison K Williams , who calls on them to be Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, and responsible for Kicking off the narrative. In other words, “SUCK.”
It sucks all right.
And why? Because no such glory light shines on Chapter 2s—ever the bridesmaids, never the bride, dragging the weight of Chapter 1 behind them like a train. Yet second chapters are also charged with important work. Exploding into meaning and intrigue, for example. Maintaining momentum. Keeping the reader riveted.
A few years ago, Chapter 1 of my memoir-in-progress migrated to the Chapter 15 position. Some time later, it migrated back—and I found myself with a Chapter 2 dilemma. What had worked before no longer did. Not only that, but I’d also learned more about myself as a writer and about my relationship with a mother who had tethered her only child to her like a yo-yo, drawing me near with a moment’s kindness, before thrusting me away.
I would need to write a new Chapter 2. And it would need to somehow bridge Chapter 1—in which I drop hints about my seven-year estrangement from my parents—to the rest of the story.
Which posed the question: Should my second chapter describe the events that led to that estrangement? But oh, what an early downer for the reader, friends cautioned.
Okay, then should it divert to my mother’s heartbreaking history? Memoirs are supposed to be about you, not your mother.
But not everyone agrees with that advice, including published authors. And I found precious little guidance on Chapter 2 approaches in books and workshops.
So, I decided to do what writing-craft instructors often do: I went to source. I hauled more than 20 memoirs from my shelves and studied the coupling between their first and second chapters.
My limited research uncovered how these memoirists steered their second chapters in one of three different directions.
1. Flashbacks and backstory: A dive into the past (and sometimes the future) to lay out the catalyst for first-chapter events.
In the prologue of Tara Westover’s Educated , a school bus rolls by without stopping, and we learn that school plays no role in this family; the second chapter flashes back to her dad brandishing a bible and decrying “the sinfulness of milk.”
Meredith May’s The Honey Bus opens with the child-narrator’s happiness with beekeeper grandpa, her parents divorced; in the second chapter, an angry, not-yet-divorced mom aims a pepper grinder at her husband.
In Wild , an emotionally fragile Cheryl Strayed hikes the PCT; her second chapter begins, “My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings.” (I love that!)
Others in this category: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Motherland, Negative Space, Priestdaddy.
2. (Auto)biographical : Beginning with “I (or mom) was born…”
In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, Jeanette Winterson shares that she was beaten as a child but refused to cry; in Chapter 2, she says Manchester was “a good place to be born.”
Cea Sunrise Person’s North of Normal celebrates her childhood in the bush; she begins her second chapter with her grandfather, whose history is “likely even more interesting than my own.”
In Now Beacon, Now Sea , Christopher Sorrentino’s mom has just died; Chapter 2: “She was born Vivian Dora Ortiz at Bellevue Hospital on July 2, 1937”—and we learn how his parents met.
Others: Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, The Glass Castle, The Kiss, Lit, Memorial Drive, The Tender Bar .
3. Chronological sequence : Picking up where the first chapter left off.
Chanel Miller in Know My Name opens with her childhood shyness, and Chapter 2 builds her story from there.
Others: The Erratics, Moments of Glad Grace, My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward, They Left Us Everything.
Options and choices, all sparking ideas. Which leads me to this final takeaway: I’ve found a medium in which my nascent Chapter 2 is willing to talk to me. It’s called “writing about the aboutness of the writing.” Here’s the damn mess I’m in , I complain in my journal, and I rant, probe, do word clouds, listen to little voices, chase tangents, and wham, before I know it, a scene wells from the deep—
—my classmates staring at my beautiful, flamboyant mother at a school event. My helpless, awestruck love for her. My yearning.
Chapter 2 knew its mind all along. It chose option #1, a flashback to fifth grade, but tilted the rear-view to reveal not dysfunction (why I cut ties with my parents could wait), but a moment of childhood sweetness, a sweetness that made me vulnerable even as an adult to a dangerous mother—an important insight for both me and future readers.
Knowing what other writers do with their second chapters is useful. But knowing what your own Chapter 2 has to say is even better.
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Heidi Croot is an editor for the Brevity Blog. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mud Season Review and elsewhere. Connect with her on Facebook or X (formerly Twitter ).
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