One of my students is…

One of my students is writing a critical essay on the following topic: How does a book accomplish multiple points of view by one narrator? Can it be done successfully in a memoir?

She's still looking for memoirs which attempt multiple points of view by a single narrator (i.e., first person and third, switching to letters, a child and an adult, etc.) Do any of you have suggestions for nonfiction which attempts this? Any help would be much appreciated.

3 thoughts on “One of my students is…”

  1. Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City has only one narrator, but the quality of the narrator changes between his father’s history and his own relationship to his father. A few interesting, experimental moments–especially the Noah discussion.

  2. Alice Walker wrote a book called The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, about the time in her life when The Color Purple was published, won the Pulitzer and was made into a movie by Spielberg. She includes journal entries, letters, articles about controversy around the movie project, the screenplay, and essays she later wrote, looking back at that time of her life (considering the private and public faces of an artist during time of intense creativity and stress, to quote the inside cover copy.) V. interesting.

    A.S. Byatt’s Possession is a novel, not a memoir, but both of the Victorian poet narrators are represented by their poetry, 1st person letters and 3rd person narrative. Of course, it’s also just one of the loveliest books around for a lit. person to sink into, so well worth a read even if not exactly what she’s looking for..

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