Person on the Page

You’ve probably been warned not to do it.

Astute and well-intentioned English instructors have routinely cautioned students against using second-person address of the reader as you in academic and scholarly writing. Doing so is too informal, they have said; it creates an inappropriate familiarity between writer and reader. 

Among fiction writers, the use of second-person narration, where a you is a character in the story, is an outlier. Yes, it’s been done.  Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957) and Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) are examples.  But, critics may say, best to leave second-person fiction at that.

What about creative nonfiction? The personal essay, for instance?  In that genre so grounded in first-person point of view, so centered upon the all-important I as the clear voice of the writer, direct address of the reader as you may be seen as ill-advised, and is all but unheard of.   

Cut to the spring of 2020. At the university where I teach, we sent our students home for Spring Break, knowing that we would not be allowing them to return to campus for the rest of the semester. The pandemic dictated that faculty spend the week converting their traditional classes to an online format. 

I had planned an end-of-semester research-based literary journalism assignment for my creative nonfiction writing class.  Given the threat COVID posed to students and their families, the levels of depression and feelings of isolation students were reporting, and the less-than-ideal prospect of expecting them to conduct research remotely, within the confines of their respectives lockdowns, my planned assignment seemed impractical. 

I decided instead to ask students to write a short essay in second-person point of view.  I thought that doing so might allow those who were experiencing lockdown isolation to connect, at least on the page, with readers.  They were to write to a specific audience—the next incoming class at the university, a parent or sibling, someone who had hurt them or treated them unfairly, or someone they had admired from afar—and to address their audience directly in the imperative. 

I offered them Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer” as a model for their work.   Moore begins her piece, “First, try to be something, anything else.” Soon, though, her narrative becomes more specific.  “In your high school English class look at Mr. Killian’s face. Decide faces are important,”she writes.  Amid the advice directed to the reader, the specifics tell a story about the speaker of the piece. I instructed my students to follow suit: to write a second-person essay that offers advice to their readers on the surface while conveying an underlying story about the self.  I thought that would be a simpler and perhaps more useful assignment, given the unique circumstances of Spring 2020, than the one I’d originally planned.

Simple? Hardly.  My students reported the task much more challenging than they’d expected.  They found that alternating between the generalized imperatives (First, do this. . .Then, realize this . . .) and specific details from their own experience was trickier than any of us assumed it would be. But as they worked at their writing, they reported that the assignment benefited them as writers in a couple of ways. 

1) Writing in second person about a personal experience allowed them to gain emotional distance from the events. They were no longer the subject of their text; a fictionalized you became the subject. This distance allowed them to be more open and candid as they told their own story.

2) Visualizing a specific audience and insinuating that audience into the story inspired them to be more aware of their reader, and their reader’s possible response to the narrated experience, than they might have been otherwise. They imagined that they were inviting the reader to share more directly in the experience than if they had narrated it in first-person, as if they were saying, Walk with me through this.  See what I saw. Feel what I felt.

Since 2020 I have continued to invite students to write from a second-person point of view, refining my assignment each semester to help them engage their readers more directly in their own stories. Besides Moore’s piece, I now also assign students to read Ashley Marie Farmer’s “Second Person,”  an essay that both employs the point of view and considers its effect.  Of second-person writing, Farmer notes that “it’s more intimate somehow, despite the lack of I, like a pact you’re making with a reader, a whisper in their ear.”  So, she implies, we can achieve a doubled point of view by writing in second person. Ourselves, our readers, digging in together to unearth the hidden jewels of insight embedded in our everyday experiences.  

I have experimented with writing memoir in second-person myself and, in the spirit of audience awareness, I invite you, my readers who write creative nonfiction, to experiment with it, too.  See what you think. And, please, let me know how it goes.