Reading Response to Jhumpa Lahiri's "Once in a Lifetime"

  You told us in class that this was a very hyper realism story and for some reason I thought it was going to be a lot different than what it was. I loved, however, what it actually was. The story was interesting. Lahiri had this really interesting way of voicing the story. It seemed as though she was recollecting everything that she had experienced as a juvenile thirteen year old girl to her friend from a much older age. The way she dies this is by referring to him as you and those things associated to him as yours.
  I kept getting angry at this mother of Hema's. I don't know how traditionally one is to pay respect to guests in their culture but everything her mother did just seemed to infuriate me. I get that she is thirteen and the other family helped them out a lot when Hema was first born but still, everything that her mother did was mainly to just impress her friend and her family. It almost seemed like jealously.
  In relation to the essay you also made us read for today, I was curious why you made us read this as well. There is a few lines on the second to last page that goes against everything you said about tears and how they don't need to be in stories. However, I then thought that this is the speaker getting us into the mind of this thirteen year old girl and I realized that that is how a thirteen year old would say that. What solidified it was what came next and it was our speaker saying she was crying because of being so close to a dead women and that she stayed in her house, etc. The whole story was told this way. The speaker would change voice as time progressed and done in the hyper realism way of writing, it makes the story seem more natural.