YOU ARE SUCH A ONE by Nancy Springer

“You are Such a One” is a pleasant surprise in a world full of first person and third person narrators. As the title suggests Springer’s story is told in the second person, meaning that the narrator pronoun is ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ or ‘s/he.’ Second person is a dangerous writer’s toy, an experimental point of view that is rarely used, simply because it is so different that readers will focus on the point of view and not the story (just as I am doing here), but where many second person stories fail this one succeeds.

The reason that Springer’s story succeeds is that the point of view, even though it is second person, is unobtrusive and does not distract from the story. Instead, the point of view gives the reader an added level of ghostly horror. The main character is experiencing, reliving a very traumatic experience that makes the displaced narrative sense seem psychologically appropriate; she is literally standing next to herself in a déjà vu nightmare of domestic horror.

The main character is a woman out of one of those classic tales that feminists will explore about the 50s and 60s male-female domestic home dynamics. He goes to work. She stays at home. He pays the bills. She does the housework. Except that, she has a job at the local bank as a teller. She is modest and soft-spoken, and doesn’t feel the need to speak up about men who have been promoted while she has not. She glides through her life taking the paths of least resistance, even when it mean letting six people cut in front of her at the grocery store.

Then one day, while driving down the highway in Nebraska count the number of painfully abrupt and sweaty hot flashes, she comes to discover that she is a ghost. She haunts a little middleclass house that no one is willing to live in except for the Hispanic caretaker, who has experience dealing with ghosts. He tells the narrator that she has been haunting this house for years and that he sees her almost every night.

She is rightfully disturbed to discover that she is a ghost and has to find the underlying cause of her personal mystery right away. However, what she discovers is horrifyingly sad.

Whatever your reason for reading this story, read it because it is good fiction. However, it is nice to happen upon a well-written ghost story about a menopausal woman in the second person point of view.

Springer, Nancy. “You are Such a One.” Fantasy & Science Fiction. August / September 2009, Vol. 117, No. 1 & 2. p. 50 - 60