Hilary Leichter on the Partnership Between Reader and Writer

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

If I tell you that a character is heartbroken, does that break your heart? No, it doesn’t. But now the heartbreak is here, lingering on the page, what to do with it? Let’s put it away for a minute, pull up a floorboard in this paragraph and hide it there.

If I show you how she is heartbroken, does that break your heart? No, no, no. I try to describe her heartbreak: it feels like leaning back too far in a chair. Maybe you are sitting in a chair, reading this, and you catch your hand against the wall to keep steady. Cool! Maybe you feel the residue of her heartbreak. (Probably not.) I nix the chair and try another simile, god help us: Her heartbreak, it feels like leaning back too far into herself. Does that break your heart, or does it just make you think about broken hearts? Or maybe you are still thinking about chairs. Or similes.

I could reveal why she is heartbroken—does that break your heart? Maybe a little. I could put it in a parenthetical, a small chamber for the feelings. (Great love died young. She dies young too.) The plainness of the aside might stir something beyond the page. The project of connecting our character, still leaning back in her chair, with this abrupt past and future, might catalyze something adjacent to feeling. The reader is asked to carry the missing years and details, to carry the heartbreak.

It is a curious thing, to feel anything at all, looking at ink on paper. But the reader is not just looking—the reader is reading, retaining sentences, and retrieving them, aligning one chapter with the next. If the reader is asked to carry a part of the book, they will take it to a place the author has never seen. When a book arrives somewhere emotionally moving, it’s because the reader has helped put it there.

Sometimes, we are invited to carry experimental structures. In Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra, a novel written in the form of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, the reader is required to take an exam and carry the answers. In one section, the test-taker must “mark the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text.” We are faced with terrible questions:

27. A child

1. You dream that you lose a child.

2. You wake up.

3. You cry.

4. You lose a child.

5. You cry.

A) 1—2—3—4—5

B) 1—2—3—5 —4

C) 2—3—4—5—1

D) 3—4—5—1—2

E) 4—5—3—2—1

The reader is asked to rearrange these sentences, and therefore repeat them, to apply coherence to wild incoherence again and again. By executing the instructions, the reader carries out the futility of this miniature plot. We cannot avoid number four, and we must always cry twice. We become responsible for the heartbreak as a way of receiving it. And without a willing test-taker, the plot cannot move forward.

Sometimes the reader is asked to carry a single word, and the word transfigures the world of the book. Consider this scene from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, where Anne Elliot, a spinster of twenty-seven, learns that her ex-fiancé will be visiting her home. After eight years apart, in which heartbreak has been keenly felt by both, he will be living where she has lived. No one can remember his name, except of course for Anne:

After waiting another moment—

“You mean Mr Wentworth, I suppose?” said Anne.

Mr Shepherd was all gratitude.

“Wentworth was the very name! Mr Wentworth was the very man. He had the curacy of Monkford, you know, Sir Walter, some time back, for two or three years. Came there about the year –––5, I take it. You remember him, I am sure.”

“Wentworth? Oh! ay, —Mr Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common.”

The name Wentworth then disappears from the prose for the rest of the chapter. We are tasked with carrying his name for Anne, so he can exist somewhere beyond the page, the way he has continued to exist without her. The scene moves on, all participants oblivious to the way the world has stopped. Anne no longer contributes to the conversation, she listens. Will she have a reason to say his name again? We continue to hold Wentworth for her. She can’t even say it to herself. He briefly materializes in the last line of the chapter, in devastating italics. Anne thinks: “‘a few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here.’” The only safe place for Wentworth is with the reader, and the novel asks us to have our own interior lives briefly shaped by living with his name, alone.

In Love, by Hanne Ørstavik, the sentences move between the perspectives of Jon, a boy about to turn nine, and his mother, Vibeke, who has forgotten her son’s birthday. More than that, she has perhaps briefly forgotten that he exists. The perspective shifts back and forth for the length of this short novel, sometimes switching in the span of two short paragraphs, and then switching again, with no white space or indication that we’ve moved from one mind to another:

At first she thinks the car door’s locked, but then when she presses more firmly and pulls harder on the handle it opens.

The glove compartment drops open again, he stops it with his left hand so the noise won’t wake her up.

These are two different cars, two entirely different scenes. The reader acts as the only bridge between mother and son. More than that, we are tasked with fierce attention—the type of attention that Jon so desperately craves from Vibeke. We are asked to watch over him, to carry the kind of care that is absent from the novel. If we look away, we’ll lose our bearings, just as Vibeke is in danger of losing Jon.

When a writer requires something of a reader, it is an act of faith and intimacy. That’s why it’s called a “close reading.” This is not the same as empathy—it’s better. When something is required of me, I am no longer just a person near another person. I have entered a relationship. The sentences trade hands as neatly and spontaneously as the alternating perspectives of Vibeke and Jon. The book is suddenly something the reader and writer have made together. By depositing some of the action beyond the boundaries of the page, the text makes its way into the world. It matters.

Now, when I remind you of the broken heart under the first paragraph’s floorboards, you don’t even have to move to retrieve it. You know where it is—you were the one who put it there. (Were you the one who broke it?) You left it there alone for so many sentences that it has possibly changed. And I never named that character, did I? Her name existed somewhere off the page, with you. If you look for her, it is like leaning back so far into someone else, you land in yourself. It might’ve been your own heart, hidden there, all along.

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Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter is available now via Ecco.