Van Wert designates every other essay in Memory Links as a "theme" essay. In these essays he affirms the importance of neighborhoods; contemplates homesickness and the "empty nest"; recollects his experiences in Vietnam; remembers how, as father of three small boys, he mined his own youthful experiences for bedtime storytelling; and shows that, in a writer's eye, even phone books, junk mail, and income tax returns can yield rich narrative possibilities.

The writings reveal how even the commonplace in our lives can be multilayered and richly evocative. The book's title essay, for instance, takes the golf course as its setting: it is at once a boyhood hunting ground for fishing worms, a site for a highschool student's romantic reenactment of the sled crash in Ethan Frome, a common ground between a grown son and his aging father, and a refuge from career pressures and the cares of middle age.

Alternating with the theme essays are "state-name" essays, bearing such titles as "Georgia," "Texas," and "Indiana." They are neither travelogues nor profiles of places, but meditations on the changing nature of Van Wert's attachments to people whose lives are rooted in those locales.

From the cornfields of a Nebraska visited only through a long-distance phone friendship to the birch-bordered lake of Michigan boyhood summers, Van Wert ranges across memories of his children, parents, in-laws, friends, and through all of them, a younger self.

In the final four essays, the alternating stops. There are two theme essays, back-to-back, each the opposite of the other: homesickness versus Vietnam. They are followed by two state-name essays, "Michigan" and "Indiana," in which the sons are physically present, and a sense of home emerges.