Referring To Yourself

Anna Russell wonders why people try
and write biographies as if they’re not
that somebody. Crikey, I’ll admit I’ve
done it too; at the time it seemed the
right & proper thing, sort of distanced

‘me’ from ‘him’. You slip easily into the
third person bit when sharing lives and
living lies, & then there’s that raucous
crowd you’ve joined – most of whom
are dead & very past tense about it.

But I take her point. She is right to see
pretension in a fallacy that you're much
more interesting when not referring
to yourself as ‘I’ but rather ‘he’ or ‘she’.
© 31 May 2007, I.D. Carswell

Anna Russell is a younger poet whose talent is both
prodigious and legendary.