talk that requires no one to be listening
Ruth van Cleve's chatter is as listener-interest-independent as anything Kate Gompert's heard since Randy Lenz got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere
Context
Two women walk side by side for an hour and never once make contact: Ruth's monologue is engineered to run whether or not anyone is receiving it, and Kate, deep in It, has nothing to spend on receiving anyway. The unit of measure the narration reaches for is Lenz — the book's other pure broadcaster — which quietly ranks Ruth's talk as its own kind of solipsism, speech that has severed its dependence on a listener and become weather. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]