We by Mary Grimm, 1988
The magic trick:
A narrator who tells her story as ‘we’ instead of ‘I’
There is a trick John Updike employed from time to time where his narrator writes as we instead of I. It expands the story’s weight, suggesting that these events are not the mere day-to-day of one person but the shared experience of a group or even an entire generation. It also gives the narrator an increased authority in the reader’s eyes. This person must really be confident in what happened and what it all means, we assume. After all, they’re not just speaking for themselves, they seem to definitively know what their friends were feeling too. Finally, the exclusion of using we instead of you is surprisingly welcoming. It creates a community, and even if that community isn’t yours, you still feel a part of the club somehow by being included as an audience to the community’s story.
Well, anyway, as you may have guessed from today’s story’s title, the same we technique is used to great effect here too.
And that’s quite a trick on Grimm’s part.
The selection:
We enrolled in a class. We made a list of places to take the kids and we took them there: fast-food lunches, swimming, the park with the jungle gym or the park with the hiking trails, for walks, to story hour. We took up badminton and played for weeks with anyone who showed up on a court marked on my lawn with white spray paint, waiting our turn lounging on the old car that my husband thought he might get around to fixing someday, our backs against the front window, legs stretched out on the metal of the hood, heads thrown back to the sky. We played on into the dark, until we could see nothing except the small white blur of the shuttlecock arcing across the yard, and then not even that, so that we struck out at it on faith.
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