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kottke.org posts about Strangers Drowning

The unease of impossible idealism and extreme altruism

New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar has written a book on people who are wholly devoted to helping others called Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help. At least a few of the books’ subjects were first profiled in the NYer by MacFarquhar, including this amazing story of a couple who adopted 20 children and a Japanese monk confronting his culture’s suicide problem.

David Wolf of The Guardian recently wrote about MacFarquhar and her unique writing style, writing from the perspective of her subjects, like they themselves had written the piece.

MacFarquhar attributes her restlessness with form to getting “productively bored”: “For a profile, I do try to make the piece sound and feel as though it were written by the person themselves, rather than by me. What I’m trying to get at is a sense of intimacy, a sense that you are, insofar as is possible, inside the mind of the person, so that you understand why they’re in love with the ideas they fell in love with, what moves them, what drives them.”

These principles guide most of her stylistic decisions. Anything that diminishes the immediacy of the reader’s access to her subject is thrown out. “People think I’m a total freak for not using the first person,” she says. “The way I think about it is that if you’re making a conventional feature film, all it takes is for the director to walk across the camera just once and you have a completely different relationship to the whole story. For that reason, even though it sometimes means sacrificing great scenes, I take myself out.”

What point of view is that? It’s like a mix of first person and third person. Is one-third person POV a thing?