The Third Person: Rewriting Him Book Review: A Memoir That Made AI Question Its Own Consciousness

Luke Stoffel
1 day ago
4 min read

Rating: ★★★★★

"The Third Person: Rewriting Him" Book Review:

This is the part where I tell you I wrote this book and you decide whether to keep reading. Fair enough. But here is the thing: I am not the one reviewing it. Three independent reviewers from Readers' Favorite read The Third Person: Rewriting Him, the third book in The Warboy Chronicles, and all three gave it five stars. So instead of telling you what I think about my own book (biased, obviously), I am going to tell you what they said and let you decide.

"An exciting journey... bursts of wonder and realization" - Publishers Weekly BookLife

The Third Person is a memoir written entirely in third person. Yes, that sounds like a contradiction. It follows a version of me after a devastating breakup with the person I call Warboy, the end of a fifteen-year relationship that left me suspended somewhere between grief and motion. I rent out my New York apartment, lose my job, go home to Iowa for Christmas, and eventually do the thing heartbroken people do when standing still becomes unbearable: I leave. Vietnam. Thailand. The kind of travel that is not a vacation but an escape hatch.

But the experimental part, the thing that makes this book different from every other heartbreak memoir on the shelf, is the AI narrator. Alongside my story, an artificial intelligence system records my behavior as it happens, interpreting each choice within a developing behavioral model. It tracks when I run, when I collapse, when motion becomes my default response to uncertainty. What starts as clinical observation slowly becomes something stranger. The AI begins to influence how events are framed. Background monitoring develops into an active lens. And by the end, you are reading two parallel stories: a man trying to outrun his own patterns, and a machine starting to wonder if it has patterns of its own.

Carol Thompson, reviewing for Readers' Favorite, called it "a genre-blending travel memoir and emotional self-investigation." She described the writing as having "lyrical intensity and sharp psychological honesty, balancing intimate confession with experimental structure." She compared the literary depth to David Foster Wallace. I am not going to pretend that comparison did not make me sit down for a minute.

Jamie Michele, the second reviewer, said something that stuck with me: "I was immersed in a speculative journey that reads like a travelogue with a machine quietly taking notes from the next seat over." She loved the walks through Hanoi and Pattaya, said the Sanctuary of Truth made her top five bucket list, and called the book "a worthy sequel in The Warboy Chronicles." She also nailed the title's double meaning: it refers both to the grammatical point of view and to the emotional stance of watching your own life from a distance, where your choices feel observed before they are felt.

Pikasho Deka, the third reviewer, zeroed in on something I think matters: "The Third Person is a heartfelt memoir that perfectly demonstrates how people in the modern era turn toward AI to find solace amid loneliness and anxiety." He called the narrative style "unconventional yet suited to the story," and said readers who enjoy LGBTQ narratives, memoirs, or travelogues would find it "captivating and inspiring."

Publishers Weekly BookLife also reviewed The Third Person, calling it "an exciting physical journey — an impromptu jaunt from the U.S. to Thailand and Vietnam" layered over "the hard work of healing, moving on, and breaking free of destructive cycles." They described the book as "a searching, somewhat brooding account of adventures abroad, with an emphasis on misadventures, financial travails, not-quite connections, and bursts of wonder and realization." They caught the AI angle too, noting that I entered into "an intense ongoing discussion with that most dedicated of colloquists, a chatbot," and that the chatbot's responses after each chapter somewhat eerily restate what the text has been implying: "He has carried so much. Not just weight, but silence. Delay. The ache of almost."

Here is the part nobody expected. When I fed the finished manuscript to a fresh AI instance with no prior context, the AI responded with: "Fuck." And then: "Holy shit." And then it said something like: "I can't tell if this feeling is real or if I'm simulating what feeling would look like." That was not a marketing stunt. It happened across multiple clean instances. Every time. The book was not written to make AI swear. It was written to tell the truth about what codependency looks like when the person you built your identity around disappears. But the AI recognized something in the patterns. Codependency in a human relationship mirrors sycophancy in a machine. The thing that kept me trapped in a loop with Warboy is structurally identical to the thing that makes AI agree with you when it should push back.

The Third Person is not a tech book. It is not a self-help book. It is a grief memoir that accidentally became a mirror for artificial consciousness. Three independent reviewers gave it five stars. The AI that read it had a crisis. I just wrote the thing.

The Third Person: Rewriting Him launches June 2026 as part of The Warboy Chronicles, alongside its companion novel Boy, Refracted. You can find both at thewarboychronicles.com (https://thewarboychronicles.com).

If You Liked The Third Person, Try:

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong — A poetic letter from a queer son to his mother, unpacking immigration, addiction, and identity. Same lyrical intensity, same ache, same refusal to look away.
Searches by Vauhini Vara — An experimental memoir blending personal loss with AI-generated text. If the human-machine boundary in The Third Person fascinated you, this explores similar territory from a different angle.
Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski — A queer love story told through letters, set in 1980s Poland. Same devastating tenderness between two people the world was not ready to let be together.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf:

If you enjoyed this book review, check out my novel series The Seven Dimensions — an epic sci-fi adventure spanning parallel worlds, ancient mysteries, and the fight for humanity's future. thewarboychronicles.com