Like an intoxicating spice, second-person POV demands to be an integral ingredient if used at all, not a stylistic flourish.
Hello Loreates,
Well, the holiday season has officially begun, and before I introduce today’s post I want to offer a gift-giving proposition for you. Would you join me in nudging everyone on your gift list to re-discover the joy of browsing for books in person while supporting their local independent bookstores?
Here’s my plan for this year, which I invite you to duplicate or improve in your own way:
Use the bookshop.org store locator to identify a great brick&mortar indie bookstore that’s physically near each person on your gift list. This may require a little sleuthing to find the best (perhaps women- or minority-owned?) store in each neighborhood.
Decide on a price point for each person’s gift. Roughly equivalent to the price of however many books you’d love them to purchase.
Use each bookstore’s website to order gift cards in the chosen amount for each person. Ideally, these should be physical gift cards.
If you do this early enough, like now, you can have the gift cards sent to you, and then you can personally send them to each recipient with a heartfelt note about the gift of reading and books and the fun of browsing in an actual bookstore.
Mail off these cards and, voila!, your holiday shopping is finis, and you’ve helped save the entire book ecosystem, from authors to publishers to booksellers!
OK, now that my public service announcement’s done, let me tell you about today’s post.
I just finished reading Alice McDermott’s Absolution, which uses a second-person form of address that’s distinctive, clever, and intriguing. I wanted to unpack the reasons why this stylistic approach worked so effectively, and I thought you might like to join me in this inquiry. If you’ve ever considered experimenting with second-person POV or wondered whether it might work for your novel or memoir, please read on.
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Who are “you” in a second-person story?
Full disclosure: I generally hate second-person novels. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Erin Morgenstern’s Night Circus come to mind. Both these books conflate “you” and the narrator, as if the narrator were mentally projecting responsibility for the plot onto the reader. There’s a psychological explanation that might justify this device as a means of signaling an unreliable narrator, but as a reader I find this version of second-person to be annoying, false, tedious, and pretentious, as well as strangely insulting. I couldn’t finish either of these books, or even get much beyond the opening pages.
Yet there’s another type of second-person novel that pulls me in with the same power that those others push me away. Alice McDermott’s Absolution is an intriguing variation on this approach. It harnesses the same draw as epistolary novels (the ones that are told through a series of fictional letters or messages; think The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or Where’d You Go, Bernadette). It’s also the approach taken by Isabelle Allende in addressing her daughter Paula as “you” in the memoir Paula. But McDermott’s strategy is wilier.
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