Plum by Andy Anderegg Reviewed By Kelly Dasta

Plum by Andy Anderegg

Reviewer: Kelly Dasta

Publisher: Hub City Writers Project

Publication Date: April 8, 2025

ISBN: 9798885740463

Page Numbers: 232 

“There are no good stories in second person,” is something someone actually said to me recently. I’ve never been a fan of absolutist craft rules, especially this one. Sure, sometimes second person can feel like a gimmick, but when an author nails it, the voice practically levitates. A prime example? Plum by Andy Anderegg. The author’s masterful control over point-of-view creates a story that glides through time with an unforgettable voice that feels intrinsically linked to “you,” me, anyone. The result is an astonishing portrayal of childhood abuse and generational trauma. 

Plum is told from the perspective of J, who spends her childhood witnessing her alcoholic father beat her older brother—while her emotionally absent mother never intervenes. J herself is subject to emotional abuse and neglect from both parents, yet is not beaten. The siblings find comfort in each other until one day, when J is a teenager, her brother disappears. Under the weight of devastating loneliness, J turns to the internet. For the camera, she performs a life that’s not hers and strangers send her money. She uses it to build a future for herself, but she finds that her upbringing gave her a shaky foundation for adulthood. 

Anderegg wields POV to put the reader face-to-face with abuse. With second person, she renders the internal voice of a child, shaped by her parents’ commands: “Don’t mess up. If you have to mess up, it should be in a new way, one you could not anticipate. If it’s in a way you could’ve anticipated, it is your fault and you will get the consequences. After all, you did know better.” This narrative choice also mimics how people dissociate during traumatic events, reflected in statements like, “What happens in your house does not happen to you—it happens to someone else, some other family, not yours.” 

Second person fortifies Plum’s usage of condensed time, which can parallel how memory warps violence. In a brutal scene, J’s dad is beating her brother with a belt. When it snaps, he grabs a cutting board. It breaks, so he grabs a bigger one, which breaks too. “You stood there watching, at first, and took in the details.” What follows is a few sentences of summary, not going any more graphic than, “blood and tears and sweat.” The refusal to zoom in works well because J doesn’t want to cling to the specifics. “You pledge to yourself to remember none of it, which makes it easier for you on every level.” The reader is left with the cutting board because that’s the detail that J cannot forget, no matter how hard she tries. 

The cutting board scene is one of many examples of how the narrative is drawn from details that are acutely specific, yet paired with purposeful ambiguity. For instance, J’s family members are never named. They are simply “your dad,” “your mom,” and “your brother.” The reader isn’t told her full name, what year it is, or what her parents’ jobs are. But this is what’s important: In one section, J wins a radio with headphones by selling magazines. “You think it is a miracle that headphones even exist, that there is a way you cannot hear the world you’re in, that you can hide yourself away, and they cannot know about it.” Anderegg does not say what kind of music J enjoys listening to, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she uses music as an escape. These particulars, paired with second person, give the reader space to color in the outline with their own sentimentalities, allowing them to more deeply identify with J. 

Conversely, POV is used to spotlight the distance between J and the reader. As a small child, J learns how to cook so her dad won’t explode if dinner isn’t ready when he gets home. When J reaches middle school, her friends share excitements about growing up, but “You feel confused that they don’t know how to cook or do their own laundry. Who has been doing it all this time?” Second person creates an interesting contrast here. J is only just starting to realize that her upbringing is not normal, but “you,” the reader, have known all along—which makes it all the more heartbreaking. 

As a teenager, J becomes a cam girl, but not in an overtly sexual sense. She dances, plays music, and talks about getting her hair and nails done. In doing this, “You try to imagine what it would be like to be a real teen.” Second person allows J to become someone else, like the “real teens” she sees online. It also allows the reader to step into the shoes of the viewer. People project themselves onto influencers because they represent an aspirational version of oneself. J builds a steady fanbase, and they send her money for clothes, makeup, the salon, and college. In a twisted way, J finally experiences what it’s like to have adults in her life who want to take care of her. 

When J enters adulthood, Anderegg utilizes POV to underscore the effects of generational trauma. J sees herself turning into her dad, berating her partner, throwing stuff at him. She remarks, “Out of nothing bad you can recreate your family.” In this statement, “you” is not J, but her parents’ parents, their parents, and so on. In therapy J learns about the triangle of abuse. “There is the persecutor, the victim, the hero.” She assumes she’s the hero but soon realizes, “You are all three,” and therefore, “you” can be J, her dad, her mom, and her brother. Abused children can grow up to be abusers because that’s what was modeled for them. 

Unlike her dad, J wants to work on herself, which means facing her pain head-on. “You want to know the half-life of disease, of disorder, of whatever the fuck you lived through. One hundred years? Ten thousand? Does it get half as weak each time, or how does it work, mathematically?” Instead of offering simple answers, Anderegg uses J’s perspective to show the reader just how much “you” have to overcome to build a healthy, happy life. However, Anderegg does not leave the reader without hope. J’s therapist tells her repeatedly, in many words, “You have picked a kind and gentle man,” and J chooses to listen to her “so that it might marinate deeper into your body that your skin might know and maybe your muscles and one day even the innermost parts of tissue.” Since childhood, J’s internal narrative has been shaped by her parents, but by the end of the novel, she’s beginning to take back control. 

Andy Anderegg was born in Austin, Texas and lives in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA from the University of Oklahoma and an MFA from the University of Kansas. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Dzanc Books’ Prize for Fiction and named a finalist for The Clay Reynolds Novella Prize from Texas Review Press.

Kelly Dasta is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in X-R-A-Y, The Journal, JAKE, and other publications. She is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University, and she is a 2025 Writer-in-Residence at Casa Uno in Costa Rica.

25 February 2026