Who or Whom?

I had back-and-forth email exchanges Saturday afternoon, diagramming a sentence –– written by me, no less –– with two colleagues, English teachers who know grammar better than I do. The line is in a manuscript I’m preparing to send to my agent. The nerdy exchange saw the three of us trying to locate the direct object in a muddy sentence I’d written.

The experience got me thinking about voice versus correct grammar when writing fiction.

My book is “done,” meaning the story is written. Now the manuscript is in the capable hands of four readers, a team I typically assemble for feedback and proofing.

One reader, Mima Eaton, is the former director of a college writing center. She stalks grammatical errors with a deep passion and can smell one in a manuscript a mile away. This time around, she called me out in several places where I’d written who when whom was correct.

In voice, I replied to her comment on my Google document.

(Arguing grammar with Mima is a little like trying to contest being caught with a hand in the cookie jar: You know you’re wrong but push back instinctively.)

Bo is an English teacher, she replied, insinuating that he'd know better.

(She didn’t write and so should you, which I appreciated.)

The story is told in the first-person, cynical voice of Bo Whitney. He is a casual speaker, an outsider in an insider’s academic world. Mima is right, of course.

Grammatically, that is.

But this is fiction, and it’s fiction, written in the voice of a middle-class guy caught in a world of wealth, power, and privilege.

I write and often edit by ear (I’m dyslexic, after all). So it would make sense that a first-person speaker in my text might say who when the grammatically correct form would be whom. Yet the decision of when or when not to break a rule of grammar must be decided in honor of the story.

Colloquial diction or not, Mima’s comment in the margin –– “Bo is an English teacher” –– carries weight and is the final say: I’ll go with whom, not who.

After all, who am I to argue with a grammarian?