ON VOICES

I also think that the first person is very confining. It was wonderful to work with it in [my novel] Family Pictures where I combined it with the third person, because I got away with a lot, but more typically you only have one person's perspective, and only one person's experience of the story. You don't have the possibility of looking at the way the person she's interacting with felt about the same events. Unless there's a compelling reason for a story to be in the first person, I wouldn't choose it. You can lose a lot more than you gain. It seems easier, and in many ways it is easier, but you slowly become aware of what you cannot do as you work through a first-person novel. You may want to give the history or the feelings of someone else and you can only do it as the first person perceives it or doesn't perceive it. It's a complicated decision, and one I've not always been certain of when I undertook a book at the start. More of my books are in the third person. I love the third person because you can use it in so many ways. You can move in so close to a charachter, and then pull way back and be very God-like and comment on the whole thing. That's great freedom, and I really enjoy that. It can be hard to work well, but I love it." Sue Miller, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson == Issue No 26, Glimmer Train Press, Inc.


And so, after struggling for way too long with three chapters of Evelyn in third person, I realized it was time to try her in first. I was driving down the road, minding what I considered my own business. Side of the lip curled to one side, thinking how unproductive the morning had been. Why couldn't I hear this woman? Why? And then, out of nowhere at all (or maybe a somewhere I don't have words for), this is what she said:

One thing I have come to know in this life is this: if you don't speak for yourself, you will be spoken for. People will not just leave you be. There is always somebody on the sideline somewhere waiting to have some say. People who got five days a week to mind your business and only two to leave theirs alone. Time has showed me that it's that same somebody that's always getting the story wrong, telling it just like they been there all the time. That's why I feel I am going to speak for myself. I'm the onliest one who knows what happened and I'm the only one fit to tell it.

Now you stand there on your flat feet and say a woman the likes of me should be sent to Bellevue? Say you want to know how any woman in her right can leave such a man as Leroy? How a mother can up and leave her chil'ren behind? Well, I will tell you since that's what you seem to be fishing for. But I am not going to tell you what it is you done already conjured up in your mind. I didn't leave on account of no other man, no broad, and it sure wasn't over no dope, no smack. It was something most ordinary people like you don't know nothing about. So here I am to tell it, once and for all.

Okay, Evelyn. I'm listening.

A.