The Number One Fan

‘My name is Annie Wilkes. And I am ………’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You are my number-one fan.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘That’s just what I am.’ Stephen King (Misery)
When I first started reading, I would secretly believe that I, in some untold manner, had become the most loyal fan of the author. I always thought that I could remember a book and its characters like one can remember the basic plot of a movie. I used to feel that the sense of association built between the author’s work and myself was unique and may not be apparent to others reading the same work. I am not sure about the commonality of this phenomenon, or if it has a name but what I do know now is that when a person writes a book she may never think of these so called ‘number one fans’. People write for themselves and maybe for people they love. They write for people whom they’d love even if these people never read their books.