The Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind

I think the only way for this story to work is how they did it. With the parts of Joels dream jumping around between his life with her and even his childhood all leading up to when he first met her. his last memory of her.  Along with the sub plot of the people erasing his memory. This kind of relates to memento with its backwards story line with some parts which a subplot of the main story.