Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Most narrative novels roll this way, and that includes autobiographies.
Exposition (Initial Situation)
Small Russian Boy Comes to Consciousness
Vladimir Nabokov is born to a wealthy, politically active St. Petersburg, Russia family at the turn of the twentieth century. He climbs around in furniture forts, suffers the usual childhood sicknesses, and goes on vacation. Things seem like they're going pretty okay for this little dude.
Rising Action (Conflict, Complication)
Things Begin to Get Weird
As Vladimir grows, he starts to pay more attention to what's going on around him. While he's falling in love with poetry, becoming a serious butterfly hunter, and canoodling with his first GF, his father is speaking out on Tsarist rule, and later, the Bolsheviks. While Dad's in jail doing a three-month stint in solitary, Vladimir proudly finishes his first poem.
Climax (Crisis, Turning Point)
Leaving St. Petersburg
When fighting comes to St. Petersburg, it's time for the Nabokov family to ship out, and fast. Once they get to Yalta, everything seems fine for a while, but the fighting spreads and it's time to leave the Mother Country. They head to Greece, spend a hot second in France, and then hit London where everything is pricey. The family heads to Berlin, leaving Vladimir and his brother to study at Cambridge University.
Falling Action
Stranger in a Strange Land
Vladimir spends the next eleven or so years as an émigré in exile, first graduating from Cambridge, then heading to Berlin, where he meets his wife and falls in love. In the meantime, though, he's suffering from a deep homesickness, and even other Russian writers can't offer him a way out of it. He scraps along best he can, and as he and his wife raise their baby son, they're aware that he won't have everything they did as kids.
Resolution (Denouement)
The American Dream
The little family leaves Berlin and spends a few years in France. Vladimir is beginning to make more off his books. In 1940, with World War Two raging, Vladimir and his family finally get a visa to head to the States. The book closes as they head to the docks to meet the ship that'll take them to the land of the free.