All Around Atlantis by Deborah Eisenberg

This story really caught my writer's attention. Eisenberg uses first person addressing another character in the story. The conversation is imagined, so works as memory but is conversational in style. I have often used first person conversation with the reader, but this style really spoke to me. The intimacy that the point of view creates draws the reader right in, and the conversation style allows Eisenberg to use asides and humor. But the other component of it that serves to strengthen the story is that it's a conversation between two people who "know" so the protagonist isn't explaining everything to a new person. Plus, her use of the fact that the two haven't interacted in thirty years gives Eisenberg the license to inform Peter (and us) about the other characters in the story.

'Your own, much more modest, catastrophe was quite a different thing. Now, there was a disaster one could speak of; the sort of disaster that might be experienced by human beings like ourselves; victims we could all—including Mr. and Mrs. Chandler—endorse! I must have been right, Paige told me excitedly, only a few days after her Doubts, you probably escaped—there'd been Communists swarming all over Budapest!

How gratified you would have been to her Paige's conjectural account of your escape, lined as it was the monuments to you—You Scrambling Over Tanks in the Streets. You Dodging Bullets, You in Hand-to Hand Combat with Soldiers…

"Peter?" was what I said. "I'll bet Peter was hiding under the bed."'

Eisenberg gives us Anna's opinion of Peter (one of them since their relationship was complex), gives Peter her young opinion of him, and tells a story. She also alludes to his young haughty self, and how—had he known—he would have been bolstered by Paige's tales of his escape. Paige's wildly overdone version, romanticized to fit her image of him, is heightened by Anna's humor, and the use of headline punctuation to give the sensation of reading a paper. This, of course, being Paige's only exposure to the conflict in Europe, her parent's The Chandlers. Anna's exposure being her mother's numbers tattooed on her arm and her alarming disappearances into her bedroom.

This choice in point of view makes the story both a good example of craft, and an enjoyable story. I've found the two don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. I liked this format so much that I hijacked it for a story I had been writing in third person. I had been struggling with the fact that I wanted the story to be about a relationship, but from the point of view of the woman only. The story felt flat and the emotional component was hard to build in that voice. After I read this story, I went back and applied this voice/pov to my story and it immediately reached the level of intimacy that I was seeking. I think it made it a much better story.