• Marginalia: Elizabeth McCracken

    Susanna Daniel

    01/2025

    For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Susanna Daniel—whose story “Karma Is My Boyfriend” appears in our Fall 2024 issue—examines a passage from Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken.


    I have long been obsessed with the choices authors make regarding point of view, which I believe are more crucial to engaging the reader than even plot itself. After all, if I can’t understand what it feels like when the protagonist sets her own hair on fire, for example, I’m not super interested in that moment of action.

    Elizabeth McCracken has published many literary gems, including “Thunderstruck,” a short story about a family who spends a summer in Paris in an effort to outrun their eldest daughter’s self-destructive behavior. The story starts with the daughter, Helen, being escorted home by police while high:

    Wes and Laura had not even known Helen was missing when the police brought her home at midnight. Her long bare legs were marbled red with cold, and she had tear tracks on her face, but otherwise she looked like her ordinary placid awkward middle-school self: snarled hair, chapped lips, pink cheeks. She’d lost her pants somewhere, and she held in one fist a seemingly empty plastic garbage bag, brown, the yellow drawstring pulled tight at its neck. Laura thought the policemen should have given her something to cover up.

    Only after Laura thinks that “the policemen could have given her daughter clothes” are we drawn deeper into Laura’s point of view, rather than her husband’s.

    The genius of this beginning takes its time to pay off. Later in “Thunderstruck,” after Helen is in an accident, the point of view shifts from Laura to Wes. And while we’re surprised by this narrative shift as readers, the change is not unwelcome—we don’t bristle at it because Wes and Laura were presented to us, in that very first sentence, as equals. The equality of their two perspectives is endemic to the story’s meaning, in fact. After their daughter’s accident, their perspectives begin to diverge, until they find themselves at opposite ends of a spectrum of understanding.

    Point of view is a pact with the reader, not a rug to pull out from under them. The point-of-view pact the reader makes with “Thunderstruck” is so strong that at the end of the story, before Wes delivers his parting wisdom, we’re pulled briefly into the POV of Helen herself, who is comatose. It’s a risky move, a way of capitalizing on the trust the author has already earned, as well as confirming Wes’s understanding of his daughter in a way only she can do. And because we’ve been handled from the first sentence not with smug literary authority but with consideration and cooperation, it takes our breath away.

    Susanna Daniel is the author of two novels, Stiltsville and Sea Creatures, and is now shopping her latest book, Girlfriending. She’s a co-founder of the Madison Writers’ Studio and has been coaching writers through the drafting process for more than a decade.

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