Beginnings are misleading. I don't want to jump on the anti-foundationalist bandwagon here but isn't there always something else that happened -- before? Chart the sun's position one second prior to the telling; different? Who just left the room? Why is that window open?

If we consider Jones, I'm sure something changed in his life perhaps a moment before his story began; his heart had beaten one fewer time, internal processes about to alter had not yet altered, hair follicles prepared themselves to die, plaque will migrate into his left ventricle. Jones lives in the abstract, of course, and I cannot say with certainty how much hair Jones may or may not have (though hair is of interest to me), nor how he will end up, nor do I know the state of his organs. Jones doesn't exist except as an example of a man now middle-aged (trapped, [perhaps], happy [perhaps] -- all of that depends upon the story), with a wife and a son and a daughter, about to laid off from a job in Aerospace that he's held for nearly twenty years. That's a situation, rather generalized, although he does have thinning hair. A beginning. In the abstract -- of course.

But with Marilyn -- whose story I'm about to tell, who will come to life insofar as any character lives on and off the page -- things were different for her, different an hour ago, different yesterday. She has to have had a life, she didn't just come to the page without a prior existence. Right?

Beginnings iterate a convention of storytelling. Aristotle demands that you have one although the epics never did. We begin where you choose to begin, in the way you choose to make the beginning: as a first person narrative, as a third person narrative, in medias res.

You must decide.