Point of View by Lina Herman
Lina Herman’s metanonfictional “Point of View” was a finalist in CRAFT’s Flash Prose Contest. More than a literary experiment, her creative nonfiction flash demonstrates how to use narrative point of view to approach painful material—in this case, the writer’s sorrow over the severity of her daughter’s depression. Narrative point of view defines the main character, in creative nonfiction as well as fiction, allowing distance or emotional intimacy, and exterior description or revelation of interior feelings and thoughts. Choosing and manipulating the most effective point of view for telling a story can require, as Rebecca Makkai argues in her three-part craft essay on the subject, creative approaches.
Would Herman’s emotional response to something her daughter lets slip during their lunch together overwhelm the narrator and the reader? The narrator worries that an account from the mother’s POV might seem “melodramatic, overblown.” (See Jennifer Kircher Carr’s provocative craft essay on emotion and melodrama.) Instead, Herman’s narrator concentrates on the process of telling the story. She shifts back and forth from first person to variants of third person, teetering on the boundary between confessional nonfiction and fiction (or film). We see the mother and daughter from the outside, through the cloudy glass window of the restaurant, and then closer. “The narrator can zoom in and watch with empathy.” And then closer yet, as the narrator returns to first-person POV. “I look at those last lines and sorrow rises in my chest.” She backs away into third-person objective (or third-person cinematic) POV, offering another exterior view of the two characters: “We hone in on the mother while she gazes at her daughter, tears threatening.” At the end, we inhabit the mother’s feelings and bodily response through third-person close (or third-person deep) POV.
In her author’s note, Herman discusses a predecessor text for thinking through the question of POV in her story: Lucia Berlin’s short story “Point of View” in A Manual for Cleaning Women offered “both a form and a kind of protection—a way to interrogate my own emotional landscape without collapsing into it.” In her playful experiment, Berlin attempts to make a dull character interesting to the reader by intertwining the fictional character Henrietta (her life filled with “boring little details”), the narrator, and the writer Lucia Berlin. The stakes in Herman’s story are higher, the feelings deeper. Lina Herman’s brief glimpse into a narrator-character’s emotional pain offers all the intensity and complexity of flash at its best. —CRAFT
After Lucia Berlin
In my story, the mother and daughter go out for dim sum on a Sunday, or a Saturday maybe, after basketball. My first draft was from the mom’s point of view, but then she got too intense, pouring all her hope and longing into what the daughter was wearing (a light gray sundress and Doc Martens gladiator sandals). Used to be, the daughter would hide under double XL hoodies so now the mom wanted the spaghetti straps, the pleats to mean something transformative. Well-being, she hoped. Embracing life. It was a reach, I know, and I worried we’d find the mother melodramatic, overblown.
Now I’m thinking I’ll switch to a third-person narrator, I’ll seat them in the window so we can look through the cloudy glass at their matching profiles, their flat noses, their wide foreheads. The narrator can zoom in and watch with empathy while the daughter reaches for the har gow in spite of her shrimp allergy. The mother bats her chopsticks away. “Don’t eat that,” she says. “Your throat will swell, you won’t be able to breathe.” We’ll hear the daughter murmur “that sounds great” like a caress. The daughter soothes herself with this possibility, the serenity, she imagines, of ceased breath.
I look at those last lines and sorrow rises in my chest.
But I flip to the front of my journal where I keep a bulleted list of reminders and add request check-in w/ psychologist? Even so, the lingering ache is more than I allowed myself to feel yesterday at dim sum with my daughter.
But my third-person narrator wouldn’t turn away. We could keep our focus on the mother without collapsing into fear and sorrow. Like, maybe the mother reads so much longing into her daughter’s “that sounds great” that the scene slows for a moment. The servers pushing carts, the towers of bamboo steamer baskets, the chattering diners all fade into the background. We hone in on the mother while she gazes at her daughter, tears threatening. She sees the daughter shrug, reach instead for pork shumai. “You didn’t know that, Mom?” the daughter says, swallowing, “There’re moments when I feel good, but mostly I want to die.” The mother watches the muscles in her daughter’s throat contract then relax then contract again—feels the absence of her own stuttering breath.
LINA HERMAN is a poet and writer living in California. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, New Ohio Review, Salt Hill Journal, and BOOTH, among others. Find her on Instagram at @linacherman.
Featured Image by Erick Zajac, courtesy of Unsplash.
