Point of View

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is written from the third person point of view. Although the novel is arguably about both the father and the mother characters, the third person narrator sustains the closest psychic distance with the father throughout. This perspectival angle is unconventional, in that a male character is wrestling with issues regarding pregnancy, abortion, and parenthood. However, the author's point of view choice is intentionally atypical. Davies uses the father's perspective as a means of accomplishing just what the father tells his students writers are meant to do: "Our job, he tells his students . . . is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable—the unutterable made utterable by virtue of being written, whispered on a page" (212). Throughout the entirety of the narrative, the father is aware of his complicated emotional response to the abortion and parenthood. By acknowledging these complexities...