In response to a question about authorial point of view, Michael Gibney claims to have written his just-released memoir Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line in a vacuum of literary influence.

In this week’s two-part interview on the chef-focused site Toqueland, he reveals that the book’s striking second-person voice -- "You are quality control. You taste all of it. If the fluke is cold, you send it back; if the pommes purees are lumpy, you send them back; if the sauce has a skin, if the soubise needs salt, if the turnips are hammered, you send them back" -- emerged simply from within, rather than from within a literary tradition including: Lorrie Moore's 1985 story collection Self-Help; Jay McInerney, who uses the same narrative "you" technique in his 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City; and Nathaniel Hawthorne in his 1835 story "The Haunted Mind,” contained in Twice-Told Tales.

After learning that Gibney addresses the reader as “you” throughout the story in order to universalize his personal experiences (“It’s more about the people who do this every day, so I couldn’t write it in the first person,” he tells Toqueland, named for the tall white hats worn by chefs) and to simulate the sink-or-swim immediacy of being second-in-command of a high-end, high-octane New York City professional kitchen, I puzzled over these lines:

TOQUELAND: Had you written in the second person before?

GIBNEY: No.

TOQUELAND: Are there books that you like that are in the second person?

GIBNEY: No.

Really? Is it possible that Gibney’s writing voice emerged from a sort of virgin birth?

Maybe as an undergraduate English major I steeped too long in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom’s seminal 1973 text warning of the creative threat posed by one generation of literary stylists upon the next (“Influence is Influenza -- an astral disease,” he argues), or maybe I devoured too much Lorrie Moore at an impressionable age. For whatever reason, I find it really, really hard to fathom that the strength of Gibney’s second-person narrative was propelled by instinct alone.

In a Paris Review interview, Moore, who has been blamed for M.F.A. students’ overuse of the second-person, explains that Self-Help “was very interested in feminine emergencies” in “borrowing from a poetic tradition an intimate second-person address.” Gibney, who wrote Sous Chef while enrolled in Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing, is apparently an anomaly in developing a narrative voice devoid of influence by titans like Moore and McInerney, both fluent in second-person by the time Gibney was toddling around in diapers constructing his first sentences.

Given his generous acknowledgment of the tradition of food writers hovering around his story's rise, we’re willing to believe in Gibney’s unconscious appropriation of second-person point of view. In an interview on Amazon's Omnivoracious blog, he brightens in revealing other influences, citing M.F.K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me as turning him onto food writing ("She’s the godmother of this kind of writing. She in her sort of Dorothy Parker way fuses light, beautiful language with really informative subject matter"). He also credits Daniel Boulud’s Letters to a Young Chef, Marco Pierre White’s White Heat, and every Chez Panisse cookbook by Alice Waters.

The best writers, like the best cooks, execute a singularity of vision that can render all tastes that have come before temporarily obsolete. By encouraging total absorption, these masters seduce even the most sophisticated readers and eaters into occupying the present moment. It is from that point, precisely, that Michael Gibney, in developing his culinary expertise and narrative point of view, has created compelling stories for the page and for the plate.