writermag.com • The Writer | 9books. What more thrilling way for a
kid to escape her suburban California
existence than to set herself firmly in
the boots of an explorer in Bangladesh
or hot on the trails of a thief? (Again, I
speak in total theoreticals.) Middle
school a blur? Perhaps more easily
accessible to you might be Italo Calvi-
no’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,
which pulls at the meta strings, opening
with a line that imagines you, the reader,
settling down to read Calvino’s latest
novel. Boom. You’re hooked because
you’re in the book, and we all know that
folks love reading about themselves.
There’s another facet to this intimacy:
In epistolary novels, where the narrator
is either spending all of her time awash
in “Dear Diary” or writing letters to
someone else, there’s an obvious push
for “you” and a handy case of voyeur-
ism. Writer Camille Griep’s first novel,
Letters to Zell, uses it, but that book
comprises entirely letters: The charac-
ters are all writing to each other, so the
letter-writer is never alone. Again, here,
too, the narrative demands it, and, actu-
ally, it wouldn’t really feel right without
the “you” construct. “I snuck the sec-
ond-person in,” Griep told me, sound-
ing guilty for the subversiveness.
But I think there’s another reason
writers try out the “you” form. Because
it’s so hard to execute if you’re not, as
copywriter Elisa Doucette puts it, writ-
ing sales copy that begs you to “wait,
there’s more!,” there’s an innate chal-
lenge in trying it out, seeing if it works.
And I think there’s something really joy-
ful in answering the call to write with
something totally wacky, something you
may have never tried out before.
And that’s where most writers get
stuck when answering the question of
when and why they might use second-
person narration. A lot of writers who
answered my call for “why” (yes! Social
media was one of the ways I distracted
myself during my long march back to
my desk, whyever do you ask?) said
they didn’t know when it would pop
up in their work. Memoirist Tabitha
Blankenbiller said, in the comment
equivalent of a shrug, “[I use it when]
it feels right.” A lot of other writers
echoed her.
There is something really magical
about the whole “when it feels right”
aspect of nailing a point of view. It ties
into the story we tell ourselves about
writing, that sometimes great charac-
ters just come to us. That dialogue
sometimes spills out of them. That
these characters who are speaking oh-
so-well sometimes do things all by
themselves to advance the plot. But
still, second person niggles at me.
Surely there’s something more to it
than just ̄\_(ኡ)_/ ̄.
Writer and teacher Sean Bernard has
an answer. He thinks second-person
narration is especially handy when a
narrator might be particularly inacces-
sible in another voice. “Sometimes,” he
told me, “you have an obnoxious char-
acter who might be really whiny in a
first-person or a third-person voice. But
then you can kind of ‘hide’ them behind
a ‘you,’ because, well, then it’s the reader
who’s the ‘you.’ And that makes the
character easier to read, maybe.”
We’re right back to accessibility, I
think.
I’ve told a lot of people that I think
we really only read for two reasons:
First, to get to know someone new.
Second, so we don’t feel so alone. Ulti-
mately, I think second-person narra-
tive can answer both of these desires in
a reader. And if the answer to how we
get there – on a dare; out of sheer des-
peration; because the narrative
demands it; because your protagonist
is a jackhat – is a little nebulous, I
think that’s OK, too.Yi Shun Lai is the fiction editor and co-owner
of Tahoma Literary Review. Read about her
writing coaching and editing services; her
novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadven-
tures of Marty Wu; and her daily adventures at
thegooddirt.org.