“You” in Memoir, Five Ways

Implementing and understanding the varied forms of "you" in memoir writing

You. Such an important word, second in memoir only to I—which is so ubiquitous that memoirists are constantly inventing new ways to escape it. More and more memoirists are reinventing you, reclassifying you, deconstructing you, and being downright inventive with you that it feels time to do a post on “you” and its many forms.

First of all, as an reader, editor, and publisher of memoir, I champion you using the pronoun “you” in your writing. You should. It’s fun. It’s freeing. Doing so offers up gifts to writer and reader alike. For the writer: some distance; a little play and maybe a challenge; a chance to, as I mentioned, escape the pervasivenss of “I” and its accustations of self-centeredness and navel-gazing. For the reader: variation; an invitation to witness from a different perspective; deeper connection to the writer and her message.

The only problem with you, being the common pronoun it is, is that is has many uses, and therefore I read a lot of manuscripts in which the liberal use of you gets mishandled. It’s a bit like not having a solid handle on tenses. What makes all the difference is your command of what it is you’re doing. Go to town, but stay in control of your narrative. I hope this primer (with examples!) will help. I have intentionally not included dialogue in these examples, but “you” of course comes up in dialogue when a character directs speech toward another.

1. Universal Writing

Here, “you” speaks to and for all of us. In the writing, “you” stands in for “we” and “your” for “our,” and asks the reader to enter into a collective experience. As a writer attempting to integrate universal writing into your memoir, reach for what you know to be true. You are speaking to human experience, not just your own. In the memoir classes I teach, we refer to this kind of writing as “takeaway,” because there’s something inherently powerful for your reader in your efforts to make broader meaning on the page, beyond your specific and limited experience.

Examples:

Drinking, A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp
The comfort was enormous. I was an easier, stronger version of myself, as though I’d been coated from the inside out with a warm liquid armor.

It’s true—it’s a statement of fact—that alcohol was key to that feeling . . .

That may be one of liquor’s most profound and universal appeals to the alcoholic: the way it generates a sense of connection to others, the way it numbs social anxiety and dilutes feelings of isolation, gives you a sense of access to the world. You’re trapped in your own skin and thoughts; you drink; you are released, just like that.

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
My habit of wandering through this world oblivious to my physical orientation, in addition to my decision to have stepped outside the containing network of marriage and family, makes me—for Balinese purposes—something like a ghost. I enjoy living this way, but it's a nightmare of a life by the standards of any self-respecting Balinese. If you don't know where you are or whose clan you belong to, then how can you possibly find balance?

Hourglass, by Dani Shapiro
I buy a Times at a newsstand beneath what had been a dance studio in Chelsea, and here I am, at twenty-two, climbing narrow steps. I am part of a parade of women carrying our gym bags, changing in the cramped bathroom into leotards and leg warmers. Pinning up our hair. Comparing our taut bodies, finding fault with ourselves in the mirror. Some are probably grandmothers by now.

Oh child! Somewhere inside of you, your future has already unfurled like of of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you’re capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that’s happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches as you vanish.

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2. Second-Person Scenes

When you write second person, “you” and “we” are not interchangeable. Instead, you are trying on a different point of view, that of the second person, as a literary device—but the experience is yours. This is an effective tool for memoirists because it provides distance from your experience while simultaneously giving your reader more intimacy. You ask your reader to enter into your point of view, but in using “you,” you beckon them to actually try on what you’ve experienced. In flipping the lens from “I” to “you,” the experience for the reader can be truly visceral. Your reader steps inside your body.

Examples:

In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado
You do not realize how much you sing until she tells you to stop singing. It seems that you sing everywhere: in the shower, washing dishes, getting dressed. You sing musicals and hymns and old songs from childhood . . . You make up songs, too, with lyrics for whatever is happening at the time. She sings along to music in the car, but only when the music is playing. You ask her to sing to you, without music, but she refuses.

Purge, by Nicole Johns
The Incredible Shrinking Woman act begins, again.

Restrict, tabulate, and calculate calories. Pop ephedra-laced diet pills like candy. Any time you go over your self-imposed limit, purge. At first the limit is one thousand calories, then eight hundred, then six hundred, then five hundred. Begin purging constantly. You think you’ve hit bottom, but you haven’t.

Start running by the Mississippi River because it’s the closest thing you have to Lake Erie. Run until you’re spent. Then it starts snowing and you have to stop running.

Children of the Land, by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
You didn’t need permission to enter the bright America that was Denny’s, which was next door to the little America, the embassy, and everything was in stark relief against the big America just beyond. All you needed was money. It was easy to take part in the Denny’s America, to sit down at a booth and listen to Britney sing “Hit me baby one more time,” sometimes twice, to order an American beer with your very American burgers and fries from a nice waitstaff who wore their names on their lapels. It was easy because they didn’t care when or where you made your money, only that you had it at the time of purchase. Money was your green card, they were selling their green card—“Verde que te quiero verde.”

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3. The Rhetorical “You”

A rhetorical statement or question is articulated or posed for effect, or to make a point. Here, the “you” is not universal per se. Instead, the writer is speculating, musing, wondering, posing a hypothetical for you to step into. It conjures up a scenario, real or imagined, and enrolls the reader—via “you”—to entreat more deeply in. In other words, it invests the reader in whatever it is you’re posing or proposing.

Examples:

Lost & Found, by Kathryn Schulz
In short, losing things routinely makes us feel lousy about ourselves. As a result, we often decline to take responsibility for it, choosing instead to look for someone else to blame. This is how a problem with an object becomes a problem with a person: you swear you left the bill sitting on the table for your husband to mail; your husband swears with equal vehemence that it was never there; soon, you have also both lost your tempers. When there are no other convenient suspects around, you may even find yourself accusing your missing object of engineering its own disappearance, alone or in conjunction with various occult forces.

H Is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald
In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they're the birdwatchers' dark grail.

You might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and never see one, just traces of their presence. A sudden hush, followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds, and a sense of something moving just beyond vision. Perhaps you'll find a half-eaten pigeon sprawled in a burst of white feathers on the forest floor. Or you might be lucky: walking in a foggy ride at dawn you'll turn your head and catch a split-second glimpse of a bird hurtling past and away, huge taloned feet held loosely clenched, eyes set on a distant target. A split second that stamps the image indelibly on your brain and leaves you hungry for more.

What My Bones Know, by Stephanie Foo
Let’s say, for example, that you are hit by a car. Your brain registers the noise of the car screeching to a halt, the grille speeding toward you. It shoots out an onslaught of stress and cortisol that elevate your heart rate and blood pressure, narrowing your focus to the thump of the impact and pain and the sound of an ambulance. But at the same time, your brain is subconsciously taking in thousands of other pieces of stimuli; the foggy weather, the Krispy Kreme at the intersection, the color and make and model of the car, the Midwestern accent of the guy who hit you, his blue Wolverines T-shirt. And your brain imprints deep inside itself the powerful connections between these stimuli and this pain.

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4. Talking to the reader/addressing the reader

This is perhaps the rarest of the ways you might use “you” in your writing, and it’s my personal least favorite. Typically, and especially in excess, addressing your reader directly breaks the “fictive dream” (which is a thing in memoir). You are holding your reader in a story, so the moment you start talking to them, there’s a separation. The invitation memoir promises, to enter into the experience of the writer, gets broken. The veil is lifted, the dream state pierced. That said, below I offer three examples of master memoirists who’ve done this well—and my advice if you must try this is to do it sparingly.

Examples:

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by Maggie Smith
By the time you’re done reading this sentence, I want to have let go, to have wrestled myself free of this ghost, to have forgiven.

Let me tell you a little about the cento. It’s a kind of poem assembled using the lines of other poets.

Lit, by Mary Karr
Only looking back, after decades of shrinkdom, do I realize how radical to the point of bizarre his position was. he was either the genius Shirley Mink thought him to be, or a little wobbly sending me down the lion’s den to confront Mother.

(In case you haven’t read my early version of the passel of lies my family was built on—yours for a pittance—the broad outline of it needs going over. If you have read it, skip over this part.)

On Writing, Stephen King
The three faces of Frank all have different interests and write in different styles and voices, but their approaches to the hurdles between them and becoming published writers are similar enough for me to feel comfortable about putting them together. I also feel that other beginning writers—you, for instance, dear Reader—could do worse than follow in Frank’s footsteps.

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5. Talking to Another Person (when that Character is “You”)

To write to a character who is “you” in your memoir is a literary device and choice that must be established early on. Examples below are memoirs (caveat, Ocean Vuong’s novel is often referred to, even by him, as autofiction) that use this device to great effect. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong writes to his mother, as does Kiese Laymon in Heavy. In these stories, “you” is the stand-in for their mothers so the reader is witnessing an intimate familial exchange. In Breathe, Imani Perry writes to her sons. This is an effective and powerful way to write a memoir, and if you want to consider this style, I recommend reading these three narratives before you start.

Examples:

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
When I thought it was over, that I’d done my unloading, you said, pushing your coffee aside, “Now I have something to tell you.”

My jaw clenched. This was not supposed to be an equal exchange, not a trade. I nodded as you spoke, feigning willingness.

“You have an older brother.” You swept your hair out of your eyes, unblinking. “But he’s dead.”

Heavy, by Kiese Laymon
I will remind you that I did not write this book to you simply because you’re a black woman, or deeply southern, or because you taught me how to read and write. I wrote this book to you because, even though we harmed each other as American parents and children tend to do, you did everything you could to make sure the nation and our state did not harm their most vulnerable children. I will tell you that white folk and white power often helped make me feel gross, criminal, angry, and scared as a child, but they could never make me feel intellectually incapable because I was your child.

Breathe, by Imani Perry
They cut you out of me, a thin, wavering, bloody line, and then my flesh stretched wide for you. And you were born brown mixed with red, like the clay of the black belt. I had barely dilated, only a centimeter, like I couldn’t bear to let you go, and the obstetrician said that at another time in history, I wouldn’t have made it. Too small. Too tight. Thank God you came into this world when you did.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in the ways memoir continues to evolve, Linda Joy Myers (National Association of Memoir Writers) and I are teaching a course this spring called THE EVOLUTION OF MEMOIR, where we’re passing along to you the many shifts we’ve been noticing as writers continue to shape and reinvent what memoir is. It’s an exciting time to be a memoirist. I hope you’ll consider joining us for THE EVOLUTION OF MEMOIR, March 4-25. Details here!