There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble. - Jordan Peterson

A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened." If it's a pattern that repeats in many, many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true.

It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe.

You're not perfect just the way you are. You could be better!