Read, She Wrote

the vital importance of stories

Photo by Clever Visuals on Unsplash

May I ask a deeply personal question?

…How often do you read fiction?

No, really, this is important. There is a tendency I have noticed among some people, usually well educated people, to treat fiction as a kind of weakness, an occasional indulgence that must be compensated for with an exertion of willpower lest it become a bad habit. Perhaps it is because my life has revolved around stories ever since I was a small child, and perhaps it is because my life has been conducted within spheres that are decidedly middle class, but I have been aware of this for some time; although that awareness has been distant and rather dismissive; well, they just don’t know what they’re missing! This week I had a conversation that made me realize how deeply I actually care about this modern phenomenon, and why it’s worth talking about, even at the risk of getting more personal than might be comfortable (worried yet?).

She told me that she read fiction about once a year. Once. A. Year. My gasp was completely genuine, as was my shock and concern. The intensity of my reaction surprised me. While my mouth was responding, my brain was scanning a mental list of the books I’ve read this year—hell, this summer, I didn’t get nearly as far back as January. What book would I have picked to be my One? An impossible choice. Either I would never have gotten to read Book Lovers while on vacation with my best friend, where she was readily at hand to tease endlessly about her similarities to the main character, or I would not have raged and cried and rejoiced through When Women Were Dragons…and those are just the two hardest choices off the top of my head. (It would have to be Book Lovers, there’s nothing like falling in love with your bestie all over again in the guise of a fictional character. I highly recommend the experience.) The idea of a life purposefully devoid of fiction actually made me emotional, enough so that I became curious. Why do I believe so strongly in the importance of fiction? Why are stories important to me?

In college I wrote more than I ever had before, not just the required essays but poems and fiction. I wrote like my life depended on it—all while studying accounting. It wasn’t until I had moved away from everyone I knew (except my old friend and new husband), and failed at becoming a mother to a second baby girl, that I went back to school to study creative writing. I needed, urgently, to write again like my life depended on it. My favorite textbook from that time was John Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells A Truth. That, he states, is both what fiction is and what it does: a lie that tells the truth. For those of us who write stories, “our only job is to confront the human condition, to say that this is what life is like and this is how it feels.”¹ We accomplish this by “sitting alone in a quiet room, without distraction, face-to-face with yourself.” To write well is to immerse yourself completely in the moment…an imagined moment, that is somehow also real and present.

Every story should be a plunge into reality, not an escape from it. In America we are obsessed with diversion and amusement. We clutter our lives with distractions, with televisions and stereos and TVs and DVDs and radios and telephones. We go to movies, sporting events, we shop, we drive. We do everything we can to stay out of that quiet room, to avoid the recognition of our mortality.

And yet, we fail. We cannot ever completely mask our awareness, for “death is the central truth of our existence—the sadness at our core. Everything we love will vanish. We can’t hold on to anything.” Pretending that this isn’t the case is the single great lie of every person’s life; and there within that lie, glimmering like a pearl in dark water, the truth: “It is this tragedy that accounts as well for the beauty and nobility of our lives because in the face of this knowledge, we go right on loving, trying to hold on to what we cherish, defying death with hubris and with faith.” We can’t help it, we are walking contradictions: born to live, born to die. Such is the mixed blessing, the poisoned wine, of mortality.