Writing for one person

Writing for one person is Mrs. Berman’s principle for making writing both enjoyable and answerable to a standard: instead of addressing an abstract public, a writer imagines one particular reader. The idea emerges from her interpretation of Marilee Kemp’s letters to Rabo Karabekian and from her own practice of writing for her late husband, Abe Berman.

Marilee’s Audience

Mrs. Berman agrees that Marilee was using Rabo, but corrects the assumption about how. He was her audience, she says, and even an audience of one was enough. In her reading, Marilee’s letters changed as she realized Rabo was paying close attention: her handwriting improved, her vocabulary grew, and she found more things to discuss. She could not write for Dan Gregory, Mrs. Berman argues, and writing to people back home was pointless because they could not read.

The letters’ subject matter helps explain why Rabo mattered as a reader. Marilee described Depression-era New York: breadlines, formerly prosperous men selling apples, a legless pencil seller at Grand Central Station who might have been a First World War veteran, and high-society people mixing with gangsters in speakeasies. Rabo believed these accounts were meant to give him material for paintings. Mrs. Berman’s interpretation shifts their significance: the descriptions also show a writer discovering that someone is listening.

The Principle in Practice

Mrs. Berman presents the one-reader method as the secret to enjoying writing while also meeting high standards. The intended audience is neither the whole world nor a committee of several readers, but one person whose judgment matters to the writer. The principle makes writing intimate without making it merely casual: the imagined reader supplies a personal connection and a measure of truthfulness.

When Rabo asks whom she writes for, Mrs. Berman says that her reader is not the same age as the young people who read her books. She believes this choice helps make the books seem strong and trustworthy to them, rather than sounding like one teenager addressing another. Her test is whether Abe Berman would find what she puts on paper interesting and truthful. Although he died of a stroke seven months earlier, he remains the reader by whom she measures her work.

Significance

The expression connects writing with attention rather than reach. Marilee’s letters matter to Rabo because he listens closely; Mrs. Berman’s books, by her account, gain credibility through the imagined judgment of Abe. In both cases, the one reader is not simply a target audience but the person before whom the writer’s words must become worth saying. The principle therefore links the growth of a writer’s voice to a particular relationship, while leaving open the possibility that a work shaped for one person may speak convincingly to many.