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 are we getting dressed for? Who do we imagine might see us and be impressed, seduced, or intimidated?Article continues after advertisement
I consider my novel to be many things. An embarrassing diary. A compendium of jokes. A chronology of my life as lived by an avatar. A lab for working out ideas. In the most ideal of possibilities, I would like my book to be a pill for readers to swallow so that it affects their bodies on a molecular level. The novel is, among all these things, also a letter to my mother that holds inside it everything I ever wanted to say to her but couldn’t. Fiction is a miracle in that way. I can still recall the heartbreak, outrage, and utter devastation I felt when I read Flowers for Algernon in junior high. It lives inside me forever.
