Interview: David Haynes
A year ago, we asked each other: what is direct address, really? We knew the craft definition, of course: a technique in which a narrator overtly addresses a secondary group or figure (such as a reader or another character). But why, we asked each other, choose this technique? What’s its role in narrative?
In the spring of 2024, David was looking forward to the publication of his collection, Martha’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories. The title novella uses direct address as a key element of its structure. He couldn’t entirely say why the choice was so impactful for him. Leah had been teaching Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, and wrestling with her own memoir. In both Martha’s Daughter and Heavy, the narrator addresses the narrative directly to a character or presence (hereafter we’ll refer to this presence as the addressee), and it became clear to us that understanding the nature of the addressee might be the key to our query. As we discussed the ways that directed address functioned in these pieces, we landed on this theory:
In direct address, the addressee operates the narrative in three key ways:
- The addressee is half of a relationship that is central to the storytelling.
- This centers, in turn, the “burr under the saddle” in that relationship. This is the principal tension at the heart of the narrative—or at least a significant one.
- And the addressee is therefore and by necessity implicated in some important way in the resolution of the narrative.
What follows is a heavily edited version of that yearlong conversation.
—Leah De Forest and David Haynes
Leah De Forest: Hi, there, David!
David Haynes: Hey! (Readers, duplicate this greeting multiple times, and remember that you’re missing all the good gossip that was a feature of our regular preambles.)
LDF: One of the first things you said to me when we began this conversation was: To whom a narrator speaks is a critical, and often overlooked, aspect of point of view.
DH: As I look back on the craft essays I’ve read and the lectures I’ve attended, I don’t remember any attention to these presences. It’s almost like they don’t matter, but if that were true, why would they be there? But of course, they are bringing something to the party.
LDF: And one of the next things you said had to do with being creeped out at the theater when the “fourth wall” was broken. You were like, “Please don’t talk to me! Get back up there on the stage and leave us alone!” Why do you think, when you’re reading, being addressed doesn’t creep you out in the same way?
DH: As a young reader, I always felt like all books were talking to me, speaking directly to me in some way. Particularly books that I loved. At some point, books become abstracted from us and we come to understand that narration is an artifact of the literary arts—in the same way we know that the images on canvas are also not “real.”
LDF: Yes, the books I loved as a child seemed to be speaking to me. There’s something magical about that inner quiet. What you’re saying is that perhaps we grow out of that, and direct address is a technique to make that sense of being spoken to overt again—it’s an author’s deliberate choice.
DH: Right. Direct address doesn’t only have to be directed at readers, of course. And something is happening differently when there’s a specific character being addressed (someone also on the page or elsewhere) than when it’s the reader being addressed. And then it may also be the case that it’s some readers but not all readers being addressed.
LDF: So, addressing a specific character maintains the fictional dream—we’re within the world of the book—whereas addressing a reader might draw attention to the text’s… textness, so to speak. I’m reminded that I’m a body sitting in a chair (or ill-advisedly walking down the street), reading a book.
DH: Exactly.
LDF: And what an intriguing thought—what if not all readers are being addressed? Clearly, not every book is for every reader. Bookstores are full of treasures labored over by a lot of people; on any given visit, we’ll pick up a handful of those books, at best, to take away and read. It’s not quite the same thing, but this reminds me of Matthew Salesses’s description of an “implied reader,” which I take to be a way of thinking about the kind of reader a text is “for.” In Craft in the Real World, Salesses writes: “‘Know your audience’ is craft. Language has meaning because it has meaning for someone. Meaning and audience do not exist without one another.”
I’m interested in the idea of a text that might overtly carve out segments of the audience. “I’m only talking to readers with brown shoes; those of you with cats can get out of here”—it sounds like my elementary school sports team selection nightmare all over again. Perhaps this happens in ways we’re not aware of, or is more common than I think.
DH: This is the abstraction that I talked about earlier. I think we’re trained to imagine that we’re a lover of cats or an aficionado of brown shoes. And part of what we value in a good book is how well we’re seduced into the position of the narrator and/or character. I’m sure this is in part what you’re hearing when readers say, “I just didn’t like that character.” Or, “I didn’t find the narrator relatable.” What those readers are saying is that they were not seduced into identification with the narrator—or, more problematically, perhaps, they weren’t willing to be. That just wasn’t a head (or heart) that they wished to be inside of.
For me, I only start to squirm when the “Hey, you, holding the book: This is about you, too!” starts. Although it’s fair to say that even as I never felt as affronted by a narrator as I do by a performer getting in my face, I have often felt troublingly implicated by a narrator, like for example when it’s clear that part of the conceit of the fiction is that I’m supposed to agree with the speaker or am otherwise being manipulated—when it’s clear they’re tugging at my heartstrings or intentionally trying to disgust me.
But if it’s done just right, I go from squirming to being totally charmed. Even if I’m being read for filth. I love the audacity of that. Or at least I love imagining I’m the one being read.
LDF: When you put it that way—that we’re trained to place ourselves in a character’s or narrator’s (brown) shoes—it strikes me how powerful this effect can be, whether we choose to put those shoes on or not. When direct address comes into play, we’re overtly invited to take the position of an addressee. This makes me wonder whether direct address can create a kind of “container” for a text’s implied reader.
So here’s a million-dollar question: how does one do direct address well?
DH: This is surely another one of those techniques that varies widely from text to text. As a side note, I imagine that’s why there isn’t much writing about it. It’s hard to pin down. I mean, where to even begin.
LDF: In that case, let’s start with our preferred question: how does direct address operate the narrative? I think Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was an important book for you in thinking about this technique.
DH: I first read Invisible Man in college. Reading that last sentence (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”) was the first time I felt fully implicated by a direct address from the narrator. Ironically, it took a few additional times through that novel to understand that the “you” being addressed in the novel might be a reader significantly different from me.
LDF: Turning to Plank One of our theory on direct address, then: How do you think the addressee centers a relationship?
DH: In this case, the relationship that is being centered is a society that is unable or unwilling to see the humanity of the Black community; unwilling to confront their complicity in that history and their role in those struggles.
LDF: And the burr under the saddle in that relationship?
DH: Well, simply put, the “you” is forced to look, and to look painfully closely, at horrors rendered in rich detail. The narrator is merciless. It’s a tough journey, one that in the end destroys its own narrator.
LDF: And how is the addressee necessarily implicit in the resolution of the narrative?
DH: The novel is stridently outer-directed. While the dark truths that are recounted in the novel are familiar to Black readers and therefore no less painful to experience, the novel is directed at those “outside” readers who (for whatever reason) are less familiar with the horror. For me, the novel resists resolution to the extent that it relies on the “you” to reach into the depths to see and to recognize and to understand. Some days it is difficult to have faith in the addressee to be able to rise to what the novel asks of them.
Now let’s turn to Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy.
LDF: As you know, this is the book that first got me thinking deeply about direct address. “I did not want to write to you,” Laymon writes in the opening. “I wanted to write a lie.” It’s a couple of pages before readers know for sure that “you” is Laymon’s mother, and by then we’re both implicated in the story (why did the narrator want to tell me a lie?) and invested in what turns out to be a very difficult, and complicated, relationship between Laymon and his mother.
DH: That’s the burr under the saddle, then. This was not an easy mother-son relationship.
LDF: Right. It’s in that opening: “I wanted to write a lie.” In addition to the events that Laymon narrates in this book, there’s this ongoing struggle over the truth—not just what happened, but how it felt, what it means. And the complexity of that struggle is baked into the book, so to speak, because as readers of Heavy, we’re invited to take the position of Laymon’s mother. We are that “you”.
DH: Why is it important that it’s his mother who’s being addressed, and how do you think that drives the narrative towards its conclusion?
LDF: The narrator’s attitude to the addressee is key, right? I’m borrowing from something you said to me: a book in which a narrator addresses their child would likely have a different tone—more polemical, perhaps, or pedagogical (e.g., “Here’s what you need to know”). Laymon’s persona has things he wants his mother to understand, but there aren’t a ton of facts she wouldn’t already know, from her own perspective at least. Again, the narrative’s resolution relies on the ability of the “you” to grasp a different perspective.
An additional layer of sophistication, of course, comes from the fact that while Laymon’s narrator is overtly addressing his mother, Laymon is also—by implication—writing towards readers. “We” are in the room too. By the narrative’s end, something crucial has shifted in our understanding of Laymon’s persona, his mother, their relationship, and the world at large.
DH: Right. It’s important that these structures allow for those superseding shifts in understanding. Outside the narrator/addressee artifice, there’s always that space for the reader to pull the conceit together.
LDF: And a reader—an actual, living human reading a text—could be anyone. The texts we’re talking about appear to factor that in. Which means that while to whom the narrative is addressed invites us to take a certain position, an addressee can’t fully be a “container” for an implied reader. Directly addressed or not, individual readers are out there. Hopefully, feeling charmed. Likely also realizing how different (or similar) they are to “you”.
So, let’s talk about Martha’s Daughter. This is not the first time you’ve used direct address—it’s at work in your first novel, Right By My Side—but whereas in that book, your narrator addressed members of his community, in this novella, your narrator addresses readers. Which readers she’s addressing, of course, is not immediately clear. But she does, in fact, call them out: “Hey, you in the brown shoes” (sort of thing).
DH: In the novella, the narrator, Cynthia, who is a Black woman, is speaking to the reader. Over time, it should become apparent that her assumption is that the reader she’s addressing is white. As noted above, as a reader who has had the “pleasure” of being implicated myself, I couldn’t resist giving it another go.
LDF: Maybe some brief context: when the novella opens, Cynthia is in her office at Synergy Enterprises, watching a young woman—Janine—pace outside her office. “She’s dying for me to look over and to pay her some mind,” you write. “It pleases me to disappoint her.” We learn that Cynthia has received an important phone call about her mother and is weighing her exit from the office. And we soon learn that Janine is white. I wondered, re-reading that opening, whether you intended Janine to be a kind of stand-in for white readers while you established the POV?
DH: Ah, dear Janine (he said, not being at all condescending). I actually think that certain readers, including those Cynthia is addressing, probably find Janine as contemptible as Cynthia does. I’m always interested in language as a tool of manipulation and oppression. As much as Cynthia sets herself in opposition to some of her readers, she also uses Janine as a common ground for mutual derision.
Cynthia wants to have it both ways; she both takes the moral high ground from her addressees and she presents Janine in the same demeaning way she imagines that her addressees see her. She can’t have it both ways. I’m not sure she knows that.
LDF: The events of the story are built around two central relationships: Cynthia’s with Janine, and Cynthia’s with her mother, Martha. There are many moments when Cynthia turns from narrating the events of this particular day to speaking directly to “you.” How did those emerge as you were writing?
DH: Cynthia’s direct address to her chosen “you” was present from the beginning. What I can tell you is that as it emerged across the narrative, I wasn’t thinking a lot about why that was happening or, for that matter, how it would function in the larger novella. When you and I first began discussing direct address, the draft was complete and ready to go to press, and I knew that I liked it and I knew that it worked, but I also knew I wanted to do this deep dive on how and why it was driving the fiction. The surprising thing for me is that it hasn’t gotten a great deal of response from those who have read the book thus far, mostly editors and others who are close to the process. I’m guessing that there is so much else going on in the narrative, and readers are responding to what else draws them in. That’s not a bad thing, but I do think that the addressee does drive this text in the way that our theory lays out. Finding that theory really helped me understand my own novella a lot better.
LDF: I love this idea that learning about—and implementing—craft can be iterative. We implement what we learn, and sometimes we’re better able to articulate what we’ve implemented after we’re done writing.
Turning to Plank One again, in Martha’s Daughter, the direct address centers the relationship between Cynthia and the story’s readers.
DH: Yes. In some ways the narrative is a kind of rant, and a rant needs an audience. And who that audience is controls the tone and rhetoric of that rant.
LDF: And how do you think about the burr under the saddle of that relationship?
DH: Cynthia has a lot of deeply felt rage and anger at existence inside this corporate world and also at the ways that “moving up in that world,” as her mother insisted she do, may have come at the expense of her connection to her own community. She takes that out on her addressees.
LDF: For me, one of the novella’s tensions is the fact that Cynthia seems to want to explain herself, and in the next moment she’s almost disgusted at the very impulse. As in, “I don’t have to explain myself to you!” And yet, here she is—talking.
DH: Explaining oneself is as cathartic as it is exhausting. A tragedy such as the one she is experiencing can be a catalyst for just letting it all go. And doing so is certainly in defiance of her mother, who is no longer around to object. Cynthia reminds us a number of times how much Martha would hate her screed.
LDF: There’s an intriguing kind of “collapse” that happens at the end of the novella—I won’t give it away, because spoilers. But I’m interested in what that says about the resolution of Cynthia’s story. Can you speak to that a bit?
DH: Well, spoilers. But I will say that I think that aside from the dyads of mother/daughter, colleague/coworker, as much as anything else, this is a story about control. All narratives about control have similar endings.
LDF: This reminds me, again, that the story’s addressee is not the same as its implied reader. In your mind, while Cynthia is speaking, who else might be in the room, listening?
DH: Martha. Martha is in all our heads. Martha is listening and judging us even now.
LDF: All of which reminds me that while we’re talking to each other, here, we’re also speaking to—hey, you.
DH: Ah, yes, them. You know, the fun part of this, Leah, was that it didn’t occur to us that they were out there until we started transcribing these notes. No offense, you guys. I mean, here Leah and I go talking to each other again, right? And you’re just out there. You.
DAVID HAYNES is the author of eight novels for adults and five books for younger readers. He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. He is also the board chair of Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories. From 1996 through 2024, he taught regularly in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Find him on Instagram @ddhayneswrites.
LEAH DE FOREST’s debut novel, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, is forthcoming from Betty, an imprint of WTAW Press. Her fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in Griffith Review, Ohio University’s Quarter After Eight, Bodega Magazine, Fiction Writers Review, LEON Literary Review, Monash University’s Verge 2020, Kill Your Darlings, Eureka Street, Overland, and The Canberra Times. She serves as an editor at the literary website Bloom and teaches in the writing program at Harvard Extension School. Find her on Instagram @leah_de_forest.
