Memoir to Three-Act Narrative

You've lived the story; turning it into a memoir that reads like one is the hard part. This finds the inciting incident, the moment the old life became untenable even before you noticed, then maps the world before the change and the arc that follows. For anyone sitting on a real transformation and unsure how to structure it.

I am turning a true personal story into a narrative memoir. My one-sentence summary of the real events is: {REAL_EVENTS_SUMMARY}. The period covered is approximately {TIME_PERIOD}. The central transformation: what I was before versus who I became: is: {TRANSFORMATION}.

1. Identify the inciting incident: the moment the old life became untenable, even if I did not know it yet.
2. Map act one: the world before change, ending with the point of no return.
3. Map act two: the struggle, including the false recovery and the real collapse.
4. Map act three: the turn, the integration, and the new identity.
5. For each act, suggest which real scenes to use in full, which to compress into summary, and which to leave out entirely even if they were important to me personally.
6. Recommend where a prologue or epilogue might help orient the reader without giving away the transformation too early.