McKenzie's first book, a novel in stories set in California, introduces readers to Ann Ransom, a funny, ferocious narrator.
It would be difficult to overstate how comforting it was to me at the time when this familiar, funny, Jewish narrator from my part of the world came off the page and told me all about her bourgeois disasters.
Perhaps it is that combination -- of a funny, casually ironic narrator and the unapologetic intensity of her emotional life -- that gives "Use Me" its punch.
The book's faults are a shame, because the 48-year-old Bond can at times be a funny and thoughtful narrator, guiding us through his childhood in Hagerstown, Md., where he fell asleep every night "imagining that I would wake up the next morning with a closet full of 1940s evening gowns".
Narrated in diary-form by a teen locked in a mental health facility, Master of Reality is volatile, sad, and often quite funny, as the narrator goes on at length about his life and its relationship to the Black Sabbath album from which the book takes its title.
Here, in no particular order, are my 10 favourite funny first-person narrators.
GreenLit, as I like to call it, consists of realistic stories told by a funny, self-aware teenage narrator.
The narrator is funny as well as depressive as she speaks of her sardonic fitness trainer, her clumsy electrologist, the discount drugstore where she props up her moods with a bag of tiny Hershey bars and a jumbo jar of Xanax.
Peter Morrison, the narrator of this funny, acerbic, and absurd début, is a disengaged "manager of customer analytics and spend processes" at a Pittsburgh company called Global Solutions.
As a narrator, Beatrice is funny and sympathetic; her voice keeps you alert even when the plot is merely spinning its wheels.
