[Warning: spoilers ahead!] It is unfortunate that Miranda July's story "This Person" breaks, on the last page, the genderlessness of its protagonist. It is a very sweet story, a brief, universal fantasy: everyone in your life is reunited in love for you—all of the tensions and dislikes transformed now, in delicate fashion, into love, and you begin a new life in this nurturing community.

Like some kind of experimental fiction, the piece avoids (at first) using any gendered pronouns, letting "this person" be a universal individual, any one of us. This person is not lacking particular characteristics, and yet this person admits any reader's own imagination into the situation. For my part, it was easy for me to imagine the character as myself, and also as several other people I know; it was uplifting to think of each us in turn being celebrated in the way of this story, and exciting letting my mind flip, as with an optical illusion, between these possibilities.

Had July kept this conceit throughout the piece, it would have transcended any individual complaint, transcended this to express instead a broad human lament,, to be a grand work of art. But then, on the last page, there occurs a "her" and a reference to "this person's breasts," which breasts are apparently quite female. In this moment, the optical illusion collapses into a much smaller figure—now we see that she doesn't actually embrace us all: it is instead her own self-pity on display.

Jeanette Winterson, in Written on the Body, manages to sustain a very precise, richly characterized protagonist who is nonetheless completely un-gendered. It's impressive, as a feat of writing, but it's more than that: it's an admirably humanistic act of imagination that draws any and every person into that big human tent, where we ultimately share very similar feelings.

I find it particularly worth noting because July does, at times, write of a situation that's not apparently her own. In other stories, like "The Sister," "Birthmark," "How to Tell Stories to Children," and "The Boy from Lam Kien" (to name a few), she seems to describe people rather different from herself. Throughout the whole collection, "The Boy from Lam Kien" is one of my favorites, because it imagines a spirit so radically separate: an insistent, uncontrollable little child.

I raise my glass to those artists who can describe, in excruciating detail, a human malady whether great or small; but to bring it across to the reader, it has to be other than a whine in a moment of pain. It has to be generous, and compassionate, and that's what July often achieves, though not, I think, in "This Person."