The Reader's Pleasure

Naming, labeling, pegging, tagging will always increase the audience’s sense that it can control if not curb the writer. Just the way our readers constantly want us to repeat and write more of the kind of text that has pleased them in the past, whenever we strike out into a totally different direction, from sentimental liberal feminism to black satiric humor for instance, they’re disappointed because they want us to continue giving them more of the same. They’re terrified that some subversive, abrasive new aspect of any writer’s sensibility will disturb that philistine bourgeois experience: the reader’s pleasure.

FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY