What It Means to Write a Novel My Mother Can Never Read

What It Means to Write a Novel My Mother Can Never Read

After finishing an early draft of my novel New Skin, I realized that I had been writing all along for someone specific to read the book and finally understand what I felt. I don’t mean that I consider the novel itself to be fundamentally a rhetorical act that presupposes a reader, though it very well may be. I mean that a writer once told me all novels have an addressee. Think of it like this: When we are getting dressed up to go to a party, who…