The best books written by writers in the first-person voice

When it comes to “selling the voice” in the first-person narrative, so much depends on the language and the style by which the chosen character tells the story. How convinced is the reader of this voice that promises us everything?

Let us only pay attention to Jabari Asim and his slave narrative Yonder, to know how to do it well. From the first chapter we are thrown into William’s world, the harsh truth of living on a plantation in the American South.

Once he starts narrating in his believable and lyrical voice, we feel the danger, and the hopelessness: ”I had known death could come at any time. You could keel over in the fields. You could be crushed under a wagon wheel, kicked by a horse, or have your skull split open because a slice of ham…had gone missing.” The first-person magic takes over and we have no choice but to hold on for the ride.

Note: There are several first-person voices telling this story, all of them speaking their own brand of beautiful language. 

There such an intimate sense of discovery in this novel, narrated by Linda, a teenage girl taken under the wing of a strange family.

Linda guides us through this natural world, the cold woods of Minnesota, both mysterious and beautiful. Her simple descriptions of place always build on a subtle sense of dread in her voice, “The sky between the branches looked like sunburn. It was twenty minutes through the snow and sumac before the dogs heard me and started braying against their chains.”

Linda’s is a vulnerable first-person voice, not in command of her world, but constantly open to its possibilities, for better or worse. As authentic as it gets.  

Some first person voices are just so naturally nostalgic, like you’re sitting around a campfire listening to someone telling you a story.

“The year my mother started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde,” or “But Gigi was the first to fly.” So many moments to hold onto in this novel, each an introduction to another tale, or a memory you can’t wait to listen to and run off down the street to share it for yourself.

The voice of August is so real and clear and poetic that one forgets there’s even a writer behind it. This close first-person voice lets us in, welcomes us into the secrets of the street. “Everywhere we looked we saw the people trying to dream themselves out.” And dream I did, along every glorious page, only I never wanted out.

Since my own book is marketed for young readers (and adults BTW) I thought I’d give a nod to one of the voices in that genre that got set in my brain years ago.

Philbrick’s voice in Max the Mighty might be my favorite young reader first-person voice. Told in retrospect, Maxwell’s voice is both wise and self-effacing, and believable from the jump. “...even though I’m a big dude with a face like a moon and ears that stick out like radar scoops…I’m a real weenie. A yellow-bellied sapsucker. A gigantic wuss. A coward.”

The voice carries the banner of strength in the vulnerability of the human condition. A lesson we should hold dear to our heart. Different is cool. Different is good. This book and its voice are timeless. 

The reason I chose this book is simple. It was the first one to show me the first-person way.

I read this book in high school around 1973 and it stayed with me all these years. This dark side of adolescence skillfully narrated by the introverted Gene is as real today for me as it was when I was a prep school kid reading it.

Gene remembers some fifteen years earlier as he comes back to visit, and tells this story under the guise of a quintessential American story, though as he says “a very untypical one, I guess, and unfamiliar transitional blur in the memories of most people, which is the real America for me.” Every first-person story I’ve tried to write since has had a little bit of Gene in it.