Who Is Telling the Story? Building (or Obscuring?) Author Persona With Intrusive Narrators

A while back I had an interview with Alex DiFrancesco that asked me if I envisioned the semi-anonymous narrators of I’ll Tell You a Love Story as the same person or not and I’ve been mulling over that question a lot lately.  I love intrusive narrators for a lot of reasons. In part, because they’re often part and parcel of fairy tales, which of course are a huge influence on my work (and the work of multitudes of other women authors).  

But I also think that the practice developed because so often I write stories with a purpose – as a manner of expressing something to someone in particular, and so my impulse was to make that visible when I was younger. And then, as I grew older, I think I was interested in using it as a means of playing with an author persona. 

Author Personas Vrs. Confessional Literature

There’s a sexist idea, often, that womens’ work tends to be confessional if they draw upon their own experiences or emotive states, whereas when men like Ernest Hemmingway do it, it’s considered brand building or building an author persona – and leads to major commercial success.  Both Sylvia Plath and Hemmingway were writing in a way that flirted with the New Critical idea of author – and yet Plath was the one labeled as a confessional writer. 

Author Persona Vrs. Intrusive Narrators 

I have never been interested in writing pure realism, but I have always been interested in exploring – and exposing in an obscure way – my own internal landscape and the landscape of others. Many of the stories I wrote in I’ll Tell You a Love Story  grew out of me exploring metaphorical ways for me to express something I wanted to say to a particular person – or what I imagined particular people would say to me. 

I wouldn’t say any of my intrusive narrators are intended to be me, but I would be lying if I didn’t at least want to create a sense of an author persona behind their use. There has been a necessity, I think, even before Hemmingway for authors to create a persona. This is sometimes uncomfortable, I think especially for female authors who are so used to being commodified, and are now required to be part of their own commodification. My draw to intrusive narrators may be a way to more actively control that commodification while allowing myself the freedom to not be contained by realism. 

Confessional Metaphors 

There’s something confessional about an intrusive narrator, but the confessions can be obscured. The truth that they’re trying to confess – the experience –it’s all hidden in the details of the story they’re telling.  It’s one of my favorite narrative games to play, and one that I still use in many of my works of short fiction.