"There is a balcony, high up, against a mountain of bricks. I am still little. The man brings out bags of earth and fills in the boxes. He plants little flowers. I have never seen flowers grow up."
Whenever someone complains about how the second-person point of view just doesn’t work for them, I think they should give Jamaica Kincaid’s short story Girl a solid read.
There is one particular short story in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis that I’ve adored since the very first time I read it, called Cockroaches in Autumn.
Stories about mental illness are something I seek out, particularly. I may be a
little harsh in these notes towards the author, not because I believe the author
is wrong or the story
21 Nov 2014: These notes were first published on the 9th of May 2013. I have
migrated them back out of the black void of the internet, and here they are,
slightly edited