All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

In writing her memoir, Moore uses a less individualistic lens than is typical for the genre. Rather than only acknowledging her own actions and the direct forces that led to them, she draws a bigger circle around her own narrative, attributing its unfolding to God’s unending love for her. Moore’s faith is rooted in the fact that God never deserted her during the worst parts of her life and helped to see her through them. As she says in Chapter 17, God was “bigger and abler” than her most harrowing trials (202). 

She uses two metaphors—a tornado and a tangled-up ball of strands—to make the point that God upheld her throughout her darkest moments. The tornado metaphor appears throughout the memoir, beginning in Chapter 5, to describe the worst events of Moore’s life. First, her father assaulted her sexually. Then, before Moore could confide in her mother, Dad’s infidelity prompted a depressive state in Mom that lasted for years. The metaphor appears again in Chapter 10 when Moore describes her marital difficulties as an “untamable whirlwind and storm” (124). In Chapter 15, she calls the crisis in which she confronted the memories of her troubled past her “perfect storm” (185).