Blog 7

Sherry Simpson, in the narrative essay “Lucky You” (2017) explores what goes through the mind of a person that is addicted to gamble. Simpson does this by narrating the thought processing of a gambler in a casino and the way in which she keeps justifying her addiction, in this case; her reckless spending, with bad luck. In this essay, Simpson choses gambling in order to describe how an addiction can damage our common sense and like any other addiction, it can take power over our actions. The intended audience of this essay are all the people that have/had an addiction or know someone that has one, so that they could seek help for themselves, and be more understanding and supportive towards those persons.

Simpson seems to convey her feelings within her writing, without necessarily giving off too much insight on them. She uses descriptiveness to convey how luck tends to be given to people that either may be the luckiest or unluckiest around. Simpson writes in a way that may leave you a bit confused and still intrigued, you must know what happens next; you must know, is she truly deserving of her own title, "Lucky You". This can be useful in our own writing in the sense of knowing how to keep your audience focused on your reading, even if at first, it's not something they may normally read. Taking notice of how she used her attention to detail in describing the setting and offered her own forms of examples to what she could have been doing, what could have been done, or what others were doing around her. Also, how she included the fact that whenever she and many others were around someone who won, they all had the same reactions; a face of envy and distaste. She knows she has an obsession, and in the end, she sees she isn't lucky for winning anything in gambling, but she's lucky in the aspect of having an understanding husband who stays by her side.