(should be on every college syllabus:) Something by a non-white writer, something by a queer writer, and something by a non-American writer. For star… - Celeste Ng

words...carry these layers of stories with them, inside them, and...they're always changing. (2022)

At that moment [he] had a sudden clear understanding of what had already happened that morning: his life had been divided into a before and an after, and he would always be comparing the two. (chapter 2 p21)

Fiction says, I believe that this could happen. It is prospective, focused on possibilities. It opens us to the possible, the hypothetical, rather than binding us to the actual. And this, more than anything, is why true stories alone aren’t enough, why we should recognize fiction and read it, why fiction is valuable. Without fiction, we might end up like the woman on the bus, unable to muster interest in anything that isn’t a True Story, that doesn’t come with shocking photographs. We would have no what ifs, only what dids. We would have nothing but the actual. And if we believe only in the actual, how small our lives would be, how limited and mean our humanity, to demand proof before we believe or conceive of suffering, loss, or strangeness.