The Ideal Reader, by Susan Oleksiw

Recently a friend commented that she didn’t like eBooks because she couldn’t see what other people were reading when she rode the subway or stopped in a coffee shop. She was curious about who was reading what. I know how she feels.

We can no longer look at a stranger holding a book and be intrigued, surprised, or smugly satisfied at making the right guess about what the other person is reading. I once sat behind a woman on the subway reading a book I had ghost-written. Although I was dying to ask her what she thought of it, I held back. Reading in public is still a private act. Now, with the spread of e-Readers, books have become anonymous. It’s as if the entire world walked around with books in plain brown wrapping paper.

One of the reasons I like being able to see who is reading what is the way it challenges assumptions. Most of the people I see holding physical books are not the author’s “ideal reader” for that book. The title of choice at once expands the assumptions we make about someone else, about the man dressed like a banker reading a history of the Navajos, or the woman in sneakers half-watching her kids at the playground and half reading a biography of John J. Audubon.

The concept of the ideal reader has been around since the first storytellers looked around the campfire and directed their tale to the most eager member of the audience. According to Dr. L. Kip Wheeler of the website Literary Vocabulary, the ideal reader is the person who would, ideally,“understand every phrase, word, and allusion in a literary work, and who would completely understand the literary experience an author presents, and then responds emotionally as the writer wished.”

Stephen King has said his wife, Tabitha, is his ideal reader. He shows everything to her first. John Updike picked a location for the teenage boy he expected to be reading his stories. “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas,” he said in Writers at Work (edited by George Plimpton, 1976).

Some writers suggest the ideal reader should be specific, and one website (www.draft2digital.com) offers a list of details to fill in, to create the person a writer imagines reading her work. The list includes such features as name, gender, age, education, occupation, marital and family status, and much more. The intention is to recognize that the ideal reader is a specific person, a character, which must be fleshed out in great detail. I confess to never having done anything so detailed, and I’m not sure I could pick my ideal reader out of a crowd.

For me, the ideal reader is someone who isn’t in a hurry, and settles down to read. She is female and reads widely. She is definitely not pretentious, but she is satisfied with herself and thoughtful. I can’t say where she lives because, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I have found readers in the most unexpected places. That means that I’ve found readers outside New England.

Now I’m wondering about other writers’ ideal readers. Do you have an ideal reader? When did you come to know who this is? Did you create this person or make a discovery while you were writing?