Writing to 'You'

Author Prachi Gupta on reporting a memoir, using second person, and honoring multiple truths

I am one of those people who only engages with the Super Bowl for the halftime show, the get-togethers, and the food—like this fun fruit helmet my friend made.

I wasn’t going to miss Kendrick Lamar’s performance, and while there have been plenty of takes on the messages embedded within it, my mind keeps returning to the stage resembling a Playstation controller. Dancers assembled inside of a game within a game, a metaphor for so many facets of our country. Performers are performing, but can’t take in the full picture from their vantage point. Can’t see what the audience sees. Some recognize the game and make their own decisions about how to play it.

Journalists (inside of this big media game) are often reporting on people who are also operating, surviving, or working within other large systems. Writing narratives about humans can involve interrogating and exploring those systems through our subjects’ ground-level experiences.

Doing so involves recognizing that just how we writers have blind spots, the people within these systems also have realities they can’t see, or choose not to see, or actively decide to deny or ignore. Sometimes we have to really step out of the scene—zoom out to clearly see a person, place, family, or institution in all of its difficult dimensions. To write about it honestly.

This week’s Q&A is with the author Prachi Gupta, a journalist who helped convey this very message to my students through her reported memoir, They Called Us Exceptional. For the last several years, I’ve introduced classes to Gupta’s powerful 2019 reported essay “Stories About My Brother,” as an example of a journalist turning the spotlight on her own life and family, weaving reporting and research into a personal narrative.

Author and journalist Prachi Gupta.

Last year, I assigned Gupta’s book for the first time. They Called Us Exceptional traces her family’s slow unraveling, and her determination to break the cycle, as Gupta shows how traditional notions of success can cause harm. In the book, she takes the same approach she did in “Stories About My Brother” and applies it on a grander scale: a reported memoir.

Gupta’s memoir is distinctive in how she synthesizes academic-level research and relies on the reporter’s eye for details and facts, filtering her own experiences, as well as her family’s, through a higher-level lens of feminism, patriarchy, and critiques of the model minority myth. At the same time, we are consistently immersed in cinematic scenes and visceral emotions. This is not a book that meanders into dense, stuffy language. Its essential digressions toggle only momentarily before returning to the main storyline. She relies on reporting to inform scenes, and to reflect as an older, wiser narrator.

Gupta’s memoir is also unique in its use of second person. She addresses the entire book to her mother as “you,” while also relying on her own first-person voice. Second person is not easy to pull off. Yet Gupta seems to do it seamlessly. In our conversation, she talked about why she made this writing choice and how she constructed an entire book from this point of view.

Examples of “You” in Nonfiction

Some authors write to younger generations using the second-person pronoun, imparting wisdom or warnings, addressing someone else—but also creating an intimacy with the reader. I think of James Baldwin’s letter to his fifteen-year-old nephew, James, that was published in Progressive magazine and later included in The Fire Next Time. In this spirit, writers have also employed second person addressing their sons: Imani Perry’s Breathe or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.

Some have written to their younger selves in essays, like this

Narratively

piece by Hector Ortiz, an incarcerated man who interrogates the person he once was. I remember another evocative Narratively essay about a mom who went to jail. The writer, Leslie Schwartz (who happens to be a close friend) wrote in second person to herself about a painful experience. These nonfiction writers use second person as a disguised first person, putting distance between themselves and a past experience.

When it comes to journalists, some have used second person to address the individual they are actually reporting on and writing about—a second-person protagonist—like this legendary Michael Paterniti piece after the 2011 tsunami in Japan: “The Man Who Sailed His House.”

Then there are reported stories in which the use of “you” is a direct stand-in for you, the reader—almost in the mind and body of someone in a nonfiction piece, asking yourself: Would I do this if in this situation? How would I respond?

Stories that come to mind employing this technique throughout the entire narrative—in a speculative style—include this Outside story by Peter Stark on what it is like to freeze to death, or this podcast about what will happen when “the big one” hits Southern California, in which host Jacob Margolis and producer Misha Euceph take you on a journey to understand what a catastrophic earthquake will feel like—for you.

Meanwhile, other journalists might use second person momentarily or intermittently, to pull you into a scene or an intro, and make you feel closer inside of the perspective of another person, like the beginning of this 2008 Mark Bowden piece, “Murder City” for GQ. Lauren Smiley talked recently about using second person in her lede for “Collision Course,” a New York magazine story about a family that staged car wrecks.

Gupta’s approach using second person to write to a parent evokes an entirely different tone and tenor in They Called Us Exceptional.

You understood that you were a guest in your home and that you belonged with your future husband’s family. If you had been arranged with a kind man, a man like those you knew, would this dream have been enough? I think it could have been.

Gupta’s alternating between “you,” and “I” reminds me of the searing truth, confession, and tenderness in Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, a memoir also using second person, addressing himself to his mother. With Laymon’s mother never referred to by name in Heavy, the “you” pronoun “haunts the text like a specter,” as Bijan Stephen writes in The Nation.

The questions in today’s Q&A came from students and myself, when Gupta visited our class over Zoom in December (the interview has been condensed and edited for clarity).

In her talk with students, Gupta discussed how to begin reporting a memoir, developing your voice, how to handle personal subject matter, how to take care of yourself, and how to advocate for yourself inside the game (i.e, working at a media institution). She was generous enough to share parts of our conversation with you.

They Called Us Exceptional was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award, named one of the best books of 2023 by Amazon and Audible, nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award, and named a “book of the day” by NPR. Formerly, Gupta was a senior reporter at Jezebel. She won a 2020 Writers Guild Award for her essay, "Stories About My Brother," which was also named one of the best essays of 2019 by Longform and Longreads.

Prior to Jezebel, Gupta covered the 2016 election for Cosmopolitan. She has also written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar. Her reporting on data privacy and discrimination for Marie Claire was in 2021's Best American Magazine Writing.

Here is our conversation:

Can you talk about the choice of reporting this memoir, instead of writing it as a straight memoir or even fiction?

I had to honor multiple truths at the same time while being as factually correct as possible. I would write “facts of what happened,” and then “how did I feel about those events?” That was the template in my head. I would chronicle events. Then I would go back and try to look at those events with grace toward everyone else involved. “Okay, this is my interpretation. But there are other interpretations. What were those? How did other people perceive or feel about this?”

How did you think about tone as a writer?

I wanted it to feel, not quite conversational, but certainly personal. There was a lot of research in the book. But I always came back to writing it addressed to my mom.

As a reporter, I rely on interviews with other people and tend to talk about things in an academic way. So, when I had earlier drafts of the book, I would go into my journal and ask: “Why do I wish my mom understood this? What do I wish I could say to her about this? What emotion is going to be going on here for me?” And then I would literally just write the answers in my journal.

In the last couple of months of writing, I began doing this journaling process. I went through every single chapter and wrote these long letters to my mom. I put out a bunch of that emotional content in the book. I transcribed and edited it down and then put passages directly from my journal into the book.

Your writing is very poetic and emotionally charged. What advice would you give to others who want to write about deeply personal experiences in a way that connects with a broader audience?

It took me a long time to figure out how to do that. For me, the hardest part was this idea that trying to write something good interfered with the ability to write something honest. For so long, when I was in college, I wanted to write something good. I looked at people I admired, and I tried to write in their style, and everything just always felt flat. It was stale and cliché.

Now I look back at it and I see that the difference was authenticity. Back then, I was clearly imitating somebody. I wasn't really accessing what was inside me and putting that on the page. I think one of the hardest struggles is getting what's inside you out, in a way that's not trying to be something else. Just honest.

So for me it took me a very long time to figure out how to access that. One of the best places to do that is through my journal. It's the only place where, when I write, I don't feel judged. Then also paying attention to the really big feelings that we have, the feelings that we’re often taught to resolve, or ignore, or suppress. Those are always the feelings that are worth exploring through writing. It tells you that you're onto something.

When I felt genuinely confused about something, when I felt intensely angry or just didn't even know exactly what I felt, I tried writing through that sense of internal conflict. I realized it is usually related to a larger issue, and I just try to parse that out. And then realizing that if you feel this way, you're probably not the only person in the world who feels this way. It's trying to understand: Why do I feel this way? What's going on here? And then linking that to larger dynamics, a larger issue. Maybe there's an event that caused you to feel what you felt. So it's chronicling that event, and then looking at that from a slightly broader perspective.

With the essay that I wrote about my brother's death, which is included in the book, I started with questions: “How did I lose this person who I love so much? How did I not even know him towards the end?” It was a very personal subject. But I realized that in his death, and in my love for him, there was also such a broader issue to explore culturally, about Asian America, about mental health, about siblings. So, using my own feelings and confusion around all of this, I was able to then explore all these other issues by bringing in research, by doing interviews, by noticing that, yes, this happened to me specifically, but it also happened in this larger context. Making those connections.

The reporting also makes a difference. It's clear that you have interviews and research embedded within the story. How did you choose to weave in and integrate this research with your own personal stories?

When my brother died, I knew the events, but I didn't understand them the way that I do now. This book was an effort to put all of that together. And in that process, I just had so many questions. How could this have happened to two people who loved each other so much? Thankfully, I have a good therapist, and I did a lot talking to her about this.

I had some political awareness. I've covered politics and I was thinking about these systems that we live under, and I began to ask more questions about why things are the way that they are.

Then I went through the research in sociology, interviewing experts, talking to other people who have come from similar backgrounds about their experiences, reading ethnographies. There's a great ethnography that really informs this book, called “Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South Asian Immigrants in the United States,” and it dates back to the 1980s—the only one I found that specifically interviews South Asian women who came to the U.S. to get married to men. It was the first book I read where I saw my family's experience mirrored, and I had never seen that before.

So asking questions like why and how, and then going down that rabbit hole and seeing what you find. I had no idea what I was going to find, but I think so much of reporting is that journey.

How did you think about and approach examining the gender roles through your parents, and then how have your views shifted around your mother?

There’s a great writer named Zara Chowdhary, and she wrote a memoir called The Lucky Ones, about surviving anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India. It weaves political and family histories. She and I were talking about some of these issues, and she had this quote that was just incredible that I am going to paraphrase here, but she said: “Patriarchy at the dinner table turns into fascism on the streets.” Throughout my book, and by showing the relationships in my family, I wanted to build these concentric circles that radiate out from my personal life into the political sphere. These are not isolated experiences. What we see at home, and what we experience at home, is a product also of the larger society that we live in and the structures that uphold that society. We absorb them and their messaging. The ways they most directly affect us might often be at home.

Understanding this is actually empowering, because so often when you're in an isolated system, you feel like you're the only person dealing with this problem. When you begin to see there's something systemic going on, it actually has an effect of making you realize you're not alone, it's not just you or your family being messed up. There's something bigger, which means that maybe there are other people you can connect with, who can come together to discuss or even solve it. There's liberation in that idea.

I thought about the way that certain men in my family were emasculated by white America, and then they took that out on the women in their lives. And what would have happened if they had been in a family, or in a system, or in a country where they felt supported and equal, and they had a healthy sense of masculinity? Would they have acted that same way? We don't know. But I think asking these questions is more interesting, because it enables us to think about what could be. What could we create in this world? And how do we get there? And we can't do that without understanding how and why the world currently is the way it is.

Was the use of second person intentional to kind of create a certain feeling within the reader, like a metaphorical death, to signify the loss of your relationship with her?

That's so interesting. I honestly wasn't really thinking of that when I wrote it that way, but I do think that there is a metaphor there, and it represents a real loss. I explore grief and familial estrangement, and the grief that comes from not having the relationship that you expected or that you wanted to have, but also the grief that comes from mourning people who are still alive. That's a grief that our society does not really acknowledge. I think the language around that is similar to death, because it's the death of an idea, the death of a relationship, the death of a life together, even if it's not the death of a literal human being. I actually do like that people are reading it that way, and that it's a little ambiguous, because it does match, emotionally, how it feels to be in that space.

In your process you are digging into your own memories, sometimes painful memories, and reporting them out. Then there's the stress of the family dynamic and who might be upset. How do you hold all of that?

I was not exactly the picture of self-care when I was writing this book. To be totally honest, when you're doing stuff—and anyone who is in survival mode can relate to this—you just can't really take care of yourself. You're just getting by. And that was mentally where I was at when I was writing this book. I don't recommend it. I don't want to do that again. But I did have certain infrastructure in place in my life. It's less the idea of being okay. It’s being okay enough. I knew that nothing was going to be worse for me than my brother's death, and I had lived through that, and I'm on the other side now of that. I found a way to keep going. That didn't kill me. Writing this, exploring this, it just didn’t compare to that. Nothing did.

I did have a list for a little while writing: Go outside for five minutes. Read something that's not work-related for five minutes. Call a friend. A list of things to make sure that I was still being a person in the world. Another really big one for me is movement. I've always been a runner. I also got into weightlifting. For me, those help so much. Then obviously, I have therapy. I've been in therapy for seven or eight years now. I did start meditating a little bit as well. It's basically having a certain infrastructure.

In the book, you talked about your experiences working at Cosmopolitan, your encounters with sexism and racism in the journalism world. What advice would you have for other writers who want to work at such great places, but also want to advocate for themselves?

I came into journalism kind of as an outsider. I didn't go to journalism school. I didn't know almost anybody who was doing it. I felt like I had to prove myself. So I didn't often want to make waves or complain, and I would automatically assume that maybe something was wrong with me, rather than questioning everyone else. I think that's a pretty common experience, especially for women of color.

Oftentimes, when you're in spaces that are very homogeneous and, in my case, very white, I would see things that other people didn't see. In my first job, I began covering racism in the entertainment industry, and that was not because I was most passionate about it. It was because time and time again, I saw other writers were missing stuff. Or I just saw these real issues, and I had something to say about them. But then if I found something that I cared about, sometimes I would get push back: “Oh, that's not really what we cover. We don't think that that's going to have mainstream appeal. This is too niche.”

The trick is you kind of have to always understand why you're taking on a job or a role. What are the specific things you want to get out of this? Because at the end of the day, this is a job. It is not your identity. It is there to pay the bills, and it is there to give you very specific skills as you go on to the next thing. Be very clear with yourself about why you're doing what you're doing.

Most institutions are going to be aligned with some kind of power system that does not necessarily advocate for your identity or the things that you are most passionate about.

When I spoke out against Cosmo, it was terrifying. I was really scared that I had just blown up my whole career. But suddenly all of these other women of color in journalism reached out to me. Not just women of color. Black and brown people in journalism, who said: “Hey, we see you, and we've got your back.” One of those women actually ended up being my future book editor, and she acquired the book. That was how we began our friendship.

I'm not saying burn everything to the ground. I am saying there is always this careful negotiation. Just be honest with yourself about the terms of those negotiations, about what you're getting out of something, about why you're doing it, and for how long and in what ways it can be useful to you. When it stops being useful, where do you go from there? What can you do that will be better for you and what you really want to create in the world?