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…
When I began drafting “Point of View,” my daughter was several years into a devastating depression. Though her well-being—or lack thereof—consumed my thoughts, I was intensely resistant to letting my feelings—fear, sorrow, guilt—rise to the surface. I worried they would overwhelm.
Around that time, I read Lucia Berlin’s “Point of View” in A Manual for Cleaning Women. I was drawn to her conversational, first-person narrator—writerly, self-conscious, working out a character on the page. Berlin’s speaker reveals herself not through straightforward confession, but through the process of writing—through the decisions she makes about characterization and point of view. That gave me both a form and a kind of protection—a way to interrogate my own emotional landscape without collapsing into it.
I borrowed the scaffolding of Berlin’s piece to create a speaker who could distract herself with technique just enough to allow emotional honesty to surface. Coaxing a small woodland creature comes to mind. In my piece, the first-person narrator turns to third person in an attempt to maintain composure—to observe, to analyze, to hold space for fear and longing. “But my third-person narrator wouldn’t turn away,” she says. That line encapsulates the paradox: the more distance I created through craft, the more honesty I could allow in.
I loved that embodying the narrator allowed me to step outside of myself, to observe my emotional responses from a slight remove. It also gave me room to interrogate the self-consciousness of the narrator herself—the way she wants to believe one thing but doesn’t quite trust it. That tightrope walk of willing your beloved to be better while also trying to face what’s in front of you with clear eyes.
As painful as the time was, writing this piece brought genuine pleasure. The technical challenge of layering perspectives—of navigating shifts in voice and emotional restraint—became its own solace. Craft offered a container for sorrow, a structure that made space for emotions I was challenged to experience in real life.
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.
