Time Is Not the Longest Distance: Rereading ‘The Glass Menagerie’ as a Nonfiction Writer

At the end of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, the play’s protagonist, Tom, declares, “Time is the longest distance between two places.” Rereading the play recently, I thought instantly of “narrative distance,” an aspect of writing craft that my undergraduate students and I discuss when studying personal essay and memoir. I use “distance” not as a stand-in for time, but for intimacy, immediacy, humility, or authority. Distance is where we negotiate the artifice of nonfiction, I tell my students: When writing about ourselves, we might feel a certain amount of authentic proximity or detachment between two “places,” between now and then, us and them, self and subject, but we always make decisions in representing or manipulating it.

Tom’s assessment—that time is the longest distance—has often rung true for me in life, but not in literature. Writing in the present tense, I’ve found, does not guarantee “closeness” or urgency, just, in his book , calls the work’s “orientation toward the world.”