Jacob Tender
217 Reads
Team
Really a remarkable bit of writing—if only for the specificity of things a 10-year old boy might do or notice or imagine. It's evocative in a way I wasn't expecting.
Regarding the choice to use second person to tell it, Tower tells <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-exchange-wells-tower">The New Yorker</a>:
First, I tried to write in this eleven-year-old kid’s voice, and it got a little nauseating and cutesy. Then I tried to write it in the third person, and there was an absence of sympathy in that approach. I arrived at the second person because that was the most guileless approach; I could get to the emotional marrow of the kid’s experience and outwit my own hand in fiction.
Really a remarkable bit of writing—if only for the specificity of things a 10-year old boy might do or notice or imagine. It's evocative in a way I wasn't expecting.
Regarding the choice to use second person to tell it, Tower tells <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-exchange-wells-tower">The New Yorker</a>:
First, I tried to write in this eleven-year-old kid’s voice, and it got a little nauseating and cutesy. Then I tried to write it in the third person, and there was an absence of sympathy in that approach. I arrived at the second person because that was the most guileless approach; I could get to the emotional marrow of the kid’s experience and outwit my own hand in fiction.