You & me
Helen M Walters examines writing in second person, with a reading of Cyprus Avenue by Lucy Caldwell
Helen M Walters
MASTERCLASS
This month we’re going to look at a story with a very distinctive narrative style.
Cyprus Avenue by Lucy Caldwell is told in the second person and the future tense and in this masterclass we’ll be looking at how those choices work well for this particular story and what else it is that makes it special. As always, you’ll benefit most if you read the story for yourself – you can find it here: https://writ.rs/cyprusavenue.
Using second-person point of view to tell a story is quite unusual. So why has Lucy Caldwell chosen it for Cyprus Avenue? What does it add to the story?
I think part of the reason why this unusual narrative technique works well in this story is the nature of the content. It is a very emotional story and using second person provides a balance of distance and closeness that allows the emotion to be handled in a controlled way. The use of ‘you’ feels like the story is inviting the reader in, allowing them to be part of it, but at the same time it creates a slight buffer that wouldn’t be there if the emotion was related in the first person using ‘I’.
Let’s look at some specific examples.
When the narrator first talks of the death of her sister Janey, there is the sense that she is talking about the experience at one step removed as a result of the use of ‘you’ rather than ‘I’. This also reflects the fact that she is talking about herself as a young girl at this point in the story, so in a sense she is talking about another person. Contrast this with later on in the story when the narrator remembers an incident when she went on a bike ride with Janey. This surfacing of a forgotten memory makes her realise that she remembers her sister better than she’d thought. This feels emotionally closer.