As writers, we engage this space between with every letter we put down, every comma, every sentence, paragraph, and scene. It’s a curious business, writing toward a reader whom we can’t see, don’t know, and who must be multiple, or at least we hope so. We write toward a point that cannot be fixed in number, space, or time. This point is, on the one hand, an ever-changing crowd, and, on the other hand, an abyss. Questions such as Who is your ideal reader? and Who is your audience? obscure the larger, more unsettling truth, which is that the writer is continually engaging an unknowable Other, a protean ghost. In a conventional, realistic piece of fiction, this protean Other, this reader, is treated as if he or she isn’t there and isn’t needed. The world of the book is a bustling, self-contained whole; the fourth wall is unbroken. The reader is asked to peer in, to witness, to identify, to like and dislike, to be moved, and so on, but the essential privacy of the separate spheres of book and reader, like the essential privacy of the woman in the balloon, is respected.
