The author speaks literally to you, the person reading the book. It is startling to have her stop her first-person account—the now standard casual-modern-non-fiction talk-text—and turn to the reader. She directly asks you a rhetorical question while calling you “you,” drawing attention to your own existence. She knows you’re there, knows she exists as a brief voice in your head, her own existence entirely out of her control. And then this sublime moment of flux is over as the tale moves on like it was nothing at all to upend the tacit conventions upon which the written word stands. She makes a salient socioeconomic point to facilitate a mental return back to nonfictionland; the reader can forget that they were a “you” that the author wrote something to and go back to being "the reader."

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