Who do we write for? Our friends, enemies, ex-lovers? Our families? The vast reading public? Ourselves? I find that the more people are in my head when I write, the less I am able to accomplish. It can get very busy in there. It can start to feel like a crowded subway during rush hour, no one meeting each other's eyes, just waiting for the doors to open. So I try to heed the advice of Kurt Vonnegut, who once said that he wrote for an audience of one.
This audience of one doesn't have to be a person you know. She doesn't even need to be alive and on the planet. Vonnegut wrote for his sister, who had died years earlier. It's not about sharing the work, but about creating a connection. The wire that stretches from writer to reader is singular. The writer creates in solitude, and the reader reads in solitude. Each is unknown to the other but, nonetheless, an intimate relationship is forged. We don't stop in the middle of Madame Bovary and think of all the other readers throughout history who have fallen under its spell, any more than we stop in the midst of lovemaking to think of the lovers who have come before us. Our absorption in a great book demands that we think only of ourselves and of the author to whom we are, at that moment, bound. We flip to the back inside flap and, if there is a photograph of the author, we examine it for clues. Are his eyes sad? Why is she looking away? What's behind that half-smile? And we imagine-whether consciously or not-that the author has been writing directly to us.
I write to one specific reader at a time. My audience of one, over the years, has changed. In the beginning, it was my dead father. I longed to reach out to him, through time and space, to have him know the woman I was becoming. Then, sometimes, it was my mother. Each sentence I wrote felt like a plea. Please understand me. Later, it became my husband-it still is. And now, my audience of one is also my son, in the hopes that someday, he will find his mother in the pages of her books.
