The students in my short fiction class this spring were fascinated with second person. The biology majors, especially, liked the idea of a narrator that was instructive and universal, the reader and the author at once.

“You” could do what “I” couldn’t, they told me. Their yous told semi-fictions about souring romances and abusive parents. “You” learned you couldn’t go home again, and you are right.

—Thomas Page McBee

I don’t know if it means anything, but I found it intriguing, this remark that it was the biology majors that were fascinated by the reader/author duality. Hmm.