ACT Reading — memoir and theme: how a narrator's view changes

The literary passages on the ACT are not only fiction. Personal essays and memoirs appear too, and they ask for a particular kind of reading. A memoir has two narrators in one: the younger self who lived the events and the older self who tells them, often with a judgment the younger self could not make. Questions about these passages go beyond detail and inference to the larger things: the theme the excerpt develops, the relationship at its center, and how the narrator's view changes across a few paragraphs.

This material gives you four original excerpts from personal essays, each built around a change of view. A woman remembers being embarrassed by her father's work-worn hands until the night of an ice storm. Another remembers translating for her grandmother at the bank and the pharmacy, and only years later understands what her grandmother was doing for her. A mother returns to the lake of her childhood summers and finds it smaller, until she watches her daughter row. A former debater keeps a list of a teammate's annoying habits until she sees him rehearsing alone the night before a tournament.

Ten questions follow. You state a theme in terms general enough to be a theme but true to the excerpt, avoiding choices that turn one story into a rule for everyone. You describe a relationship by what each person gives the other, as in the child who thinks she is the helper while being helped. You trace a narrator's attitude from beginning to end and name the scene that causes it to change. And you interpret the compressed last lines memoirs like to end on, such as a gesture that reverses an earlier one or a sentence like "I just stopped adding to it."

Explanations quote the words that decide each answer and show why the other choices, which are often plausible feelings the excerpt never expresses, do not fit. The flashcards gather the patterns: the two narrators of a memoir, the phrases that signal a changed view, the difference between a theme and a topic, and the habit of reading a final line against the sentence before it.

The material offers a quiz and a flashcard deck. All excerpts are original and describe no real people. It is written for students preparing for the ACT and is not produced or endorsed by ACT.

  • State the theme of a memoir excerpt without overgeneralizing
  • Describe the relationship between a narrator and another person from specific actions
  • Trace how a narrator's view changes and identify what causes the change
  • Interpret a memoir's final line or repeated gesture
  • Distinguish the younger self's view from the older narrator's judgment

Practice material written by Zestly, based on ACT's published description of the ACT Reading section (reporting categories Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas; act.org, retrieved September 2026). All passages are original.

Sample question

Read the following excerpt from a personal essay. The writer, a woman, remembers her father. For most of my childhood I was a little embarrassed by my father's hands. They were cracked across the knuckles and permanently gray in the creases from thirty years of repairing furnaces, and when he came to school events I watched other parents notice them. I kept my own hands in my pockets when I stood next to him, as though whatever he had might be catching. The winter I was sixteen our furnace failed during an ice storm, and he spent the night in the basement with a flashlight in his teeth while my mother, my brother and I slept in our coats upstairs. Around four in the morning the radiators began to knock and hiss, and I went down to find him asleep sitting up against the wall, his hands open on his knees. I remember thinking that I had been looking at them wrong my whole life. I sat down next to him and did not put mine in my pockets. Which choice best states a central theme of the excerpt?

See the answer

A child can come to respect what she was once ashamed of when she sees what it has cost the person she loves.

The narrator moves from embarrassment at her father's work-worn hands to recognizing, after the night of the ice storm, that she "had been looking at them wrong." The excerpt says nothing about career choices or danger, and the ice storm is the occasion of one person's change of view, not a general claim that only emergencies bring families together.

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