Episode 02 - Voice and First-person Intimacy

You probably read The Catcher in the Rye in school. But did you read it as a writer? In this episode of Leaf by Leaf, we go back to Salinger's classic not for its story, but for its voice. Holden Caulfield is one of literature's great first-person narrators, and the techniques Salinger used to build him are ones every writer can learn from. Sophie explores how a narrator's verbal tics become their identity, why unreliable narrators work best when we love them anyway, and how speaking directly to your reader can collapse the distance between a story and the person reading it. Whether you write fiction or memoir, this conversation will change the way you think about who's doing the telling.