The below guest post is by author Meri Henriquez Vahl. Her book Hoosier Hysteria is available now.
When I started writing Hoosier Hysteria, I soon realized that memoirs are unusual creatures. As I suspect is often the case with most if not all memoirs, they arise from an urgent need to share one’s experience – and the totally unexpected and frequently traumatic events I witnessed inspired and in fact compelled me to write about them.
Choosing First Person
But no matter how hard I tried to make other, more “legitimate” styles work, it became obvious that any other voice than the first person was distancing and a disservice to my narrative. I wanted my readers to really care about what happened to me and my friends, and I strongly felt that the only effective way to do that was to allow them to feel and experience things in the moment, as I had done, bewildered and often outraged, sometimes amused and delighted – in order to give my readers a chance to draw their own conclusions.
However, when I was a student, my high school AP English teacher sternly advised us, “If you’re serious about becoming a published author, you should never write in the first person!” - and he was very clear about his reasons. According to him, stories written in the first person will always come across as amateur scribbling, as opposed to authentic literature. In addition, he explained that in a first-person narrative, the character who’s telling the story can’t possibly know what the other characters are thinking or even doing when they’re not immediately present, and this will drastically limit what the author can show or tell his or her readers. According to my teacher, it was far better to use either the omniscient author voice, or else the third person narrator, which allows the story to shift from character to character and describe what each is doing and saying.
Fighting the Natural POV
Having thought long and hard about my teacher’s words, as I started writing Hoosier Hysteria, I faithfully tried to follow his advice. At first, I seriously considered telling my story as the Older and Wiser Meri, looking back on her experiences in 1963; this would constitute the approved literary approach. On the other hand, I could present myself as omniscient narrator, setting my story in the context of that particular political time and place, and describing how it affected each character, including the one called ‘Meri’. This also seemed a very legitimate approach, as recommended by my AP teacher.
But although both of these options are certainly valid, and although I still respect my English teacher’s opinion, I don’t believe that the first-person narrative is always a terrible choice – in fact, it might actually be the right one for you, depending on the story you have to tell (and avid reader that I am, I’ve definitely noticed that a great many contemporary writers have also reached the same conclusion!). In a first-person narrative, the main character doesn’t have to be clueless unless you want her to be: she can observe the people she meets and learn a great deal about their emotions from their body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, actions and reactions. And although she can’t directly know what that other person is thinking or feeling, she can certainly learn about what they’ve done ‘off-stage’ from other characters.
Choosing What's Best for Your Book
The first-person narrative isn’t necessarily right for every author or situation, but whether I’ve been working on Hoosier Hysteria or one of my science fiction stories, I always seem to gravitate to the first-person point-of-view. It feels to me like the surest way to engage my readers, to make them care about my characters, and to propel them directly into my stories – and ironically, it also engages me by giving me direct emotional access to their thoughts and feelings.
