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Writing first person fiction lets you muck around in someone’s head to see what’s there or mess with their attitude. Where do you find writers audacious enough to try this? Try literary, experimental, and romance fiction.

First person seems to slow the pace in literary fiction.

• “Refuge in London,” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The O’Henry Prize Stories 2005

The author steps inside the head of a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in a boarding house that shelters people trying to get back on their feet after WWII. The girl sits for a down-on-his-luck artist destined for fame. Bored with the inactivity and embarrassed by the old man’s attention, she comes to appreciate the experience only in retrospect.

• “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin, American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

This masterful story doesn’t pick up until Sonny sits down to jam, because we aren’t really listening until then, and that’s the point.

For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. 

• “Specters,” by Mariah Robbins, Word Riot

A WWI soldier tries to pick up the pieces of life on a truck farm in Texas with an Indian girl, but visions of his wartime experience haunt him to the point that normalcy is an illusion. Everything in his life is a ghost.

Of course, first person is the staple of memoir.

• “Horse Training,” by Renee Rivers, Canyon Voices

Memoirs are built around fragile moments. The author takes a tossed line about life events you can’t train for and draws it through a story about strengths we don’t know we have and lives altered in ways we can’t control.

The action heats up when first person is employed in romantic fiction. Selections from Love is Strange: Stories of Postmodern Romance

• “Love Letter to my Rapist,” by Lisa Blaushild

To seemingly make light of such crime, the author would have to own it in first person. Written as a long letter with no paragraphs, a rapist’s chosen target addresses him with protective sarcasm that allows her to tell her story without having victim stamped on her forehead.

• “Shifter,” by Lynne Tillman

An American trekking through Europe makes cynical observations on life as she hooks up with different men. (Do you suppose there is a connection?) Her shifting attention makes for good literature but an unsatisfying life.

I wonder if Zoran feels the hilarious intensity to our political discussions, both of us trying to display understanding like fan dancers.

She doesn’t wonder long.

• “The Kid,” By Daytona Beach (ed note: I kid you not.)

Cynicism lends itself well to a first person treatment. A conversation between co-workers frames the story.

     Kim: “But don’t you have to base your life on some kind of values? Otherwise, how do you decide what’s right and what’s wrong?”

Sybil: “You don’t. You just do everything and see what works.”

Based on that world view, Sybil molests Kim’s 14-year-old son. Hey, it works – for her.