The Slow Vanishing of the Second Person

My grandmother’s letters begin, every one of them, with an accusation: You have not written.* She sent them from Haifa to Rotterdam on paper so thin the ink of one side ghosted through to the other, so that reading her was always a matter of separating what she said from the shadow of what she was about to say. I was nineteen and negligent. The letters kept coming anyway, every second Thursday, each one opening with that same reproach conjugated in the second person — as if the whole point of writing were to establish, before anything else, that a you existed and could be reached.

It is a strange thing to notice, decades later, how rarely anything addresses me now. The novels on my desk speak of he and she and, lately, an ambient, weatherless they. The essays perform their thinking in a confident first person that wants witnesses, not correspondents.† Even the letters that do arrive — from banks, from platforms, from the subscription I keep meaning to cancel — deploy you the way a supermarket deploys music: to move me through the aisles, not to meet me in them. The grammatical second person survives everywhere and addresses no one.

This essay is an attempt to take that vanishing seriously — to ask when literature stopped believing in you, and what it cost.‡ Because the second person was never merely a pronoun. It was a wager that the reader was present, particular, and capable of being changed by being spoken to. Every you is a small act of faith that someone is at the other end of the sentence. My grandmother, who distrusted fiction and read only letters and the weather report, understood this better than most of the novelists I have loved: she never once wrote a sentence that wasn’t aimed.