The Real Reason We Read Fiction

It's not what you think.

As a lover of all things lit, I love book clubs. Everywhere I’ve lived I have started one or joined a few. Since college felt to me like one big and very intense book club, afterwards I felt lost without people to talk to about what I was reading. I eventually became An English Professor and did it for A Very Long Time.

Last year I retired earlier than expected (for good reasons) and moved from Chicagoland to Denton, Texas, where I knew exactly 1.0 persons. Naturally I started a book club. I also found one that meets at a fantastic local bookstore called Patchouli Joe’s. The club’s name is “A Little Overbooked.” I had serious title envy¹ and so I signed up. I found the club online on a Saturday and discovered that it was scheduled the following Tuesday evening at the bookstore. No time to waste! So I went to Patchouli Joe’s and bought Kim Fay’s Kate & Frida: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Books. What’s not to love about friendship, food and books? It was a fast and enjoyable read.

It also happened to be the seventh anniversary of A Little Overbooked. We had pizza and champagne and a cowboy-themed cake. There were even little gifts left on all the chairs, so I’m now the proud owner of a bookmark that reads “Wear the hat, ride the cowboy.” (Remember: this is Texas). So far, so good.

I was easily the oldest person in the room by at least ten years. There were two men total. I went completely incognito for obvious reasons. If you introduce yourself to young people as A Retired English Professor, a room of chatty women will grow completely silent faster than ice cream melts in Texas. Plus there were thirty of us crammed into a long rectangular space that comfortably seats about fifteen, and I, seated in the corner, was unable to see the row next to me without awkwardly leaning in.

But I’m still me so I could not stay completely silent. Kate & Frida consists entirely of letters written in the early 1990s between two twenty-somethings. Kate works at an independent bookstore in Seattle, and Frida, an Angelino living in Paris, writes to that bookstore out of the blue to acquire a book. Humans interacting to acquire books! Letters written on stationary! How quaint! This alone mystified most of the people in the room, and one woman admitted that she read the novel so quickly that she didn’t catch the set up.

The club leader had a series of discussion questions written down, starting with “thumbs up or thumbs down?” (English teachers take note: this strategy works!) As the group discussed the choice of the early 1990s, someone blurted out, “don’t you think that older people would get this book more?” I jumped up out of my chair and said: “Yes! I graduated college in 1990! I was the exact age of these characters!” But I was completely ignored.

Reader, this is really good for me because I’m not used to it and I need to accept my ongoing slide into irrelevance. I was a bit embarrassed, and the women seated on either side were mortified. I kept my mouth shut from that point forward.

But still I had A Lot I Wanted to Say. “This novel is about the lost art of letter writing! It made me realize how much I miss it—which may be more about how much I miss being twenty and having time to write letters!” I kept it all to myself and instead muttered to the woman to my right: “the epistolary form is the oldest form of the novel—like Robinson Crusoe!” You can imagine the look she gave me.

By now you have figured out that my title is pure clickbait. There is not any one reason we read fiction. There are hundreds of reasons. If I had to choose a primary one, because I’m old I’d choose a line attributed to C.S. Lewis from the film Shadowlands: “We read to know we are not alone.”

So when it came to Kate & Frida, the women in the room were trying to find ways to connect with the characters. There was stimulating conversation about the Judy Blume YA classic Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. I was surprised that most had heard of it and quite a few had read it. One woman even demonstrated the exercise the book is famous for: “we must, we must, we must increase our busts!” I made a final, lame attempt to justify my GenX presence in the room by blurting out, “I read that book in 1977!” No one cared. But it is still true that the Judy Blume novel connected us, and as the conversation ensued the connection deepened. This is the way it is with book groups.

This is also why I was more than a little sad that we never delved more deeply into the issue of fiction itself and what it’s ultimately for. Yes, we read for entertainment and a dopamine hit. Yes, we read for escape. But for my part, those reading experiences are comfort food: we love them like we love the safety of home. When we venture out of our genre-fiction comfort zones to connect with different kinds of people, we find surprising new things. Our reading morphs into something else: a challenge of sorts. A novel (whose name means new!) presents a new way of seeing the world, a possible new way of seeing it and inhabiting it. A new home.

A new possibility for one’s life is the point of Kate & Frida. Frida is Kim Fay’s adventurous self, Kate is her Seattle-bound self, reading novels and nonfiction to learn what she cannot learn in absence of real otherness. The books increase her empathy. They expose her naivete. They help her find her own voice and vocational purpose.

I took a trip down memory lane with the titles I recognized. I looked up every title I didn’t know and found many writers that I have meant to read for years—especially M.F.K. Fisher, the great food writer. But when the leader asked if others stopped to look up the titles, all I saw was people shaking their heads. One woman said, “I just skipped over all that.”

Sigh. At the risk of sounding like A Retired English Professor, this is kind of missing the point. At the very least, Fay is asking us to consider the various writers who have inspired us to discover who we are and who we can become. She’s also asking us to see how our reaction to them changes over time as we grow. Frida writes to Kate:

You’re right about books never changing—but people sure do. Case in point—moi! Wuthering Heights used to be my all-time favorite novel. The other day I needed a break from Black Lamb so I got myself a copy at Galignani—another notch in my bookstore list—and read it again. Geez, Emily Brontë! Cathy didn’t stand a codependent chance. Heathcliff was a total jerk. It made me realize books can also show us how we move on in life. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad I moved on from thinking all that damage was romantic—but it made me nostalgic too. Like I outgrew a childhood friend.

Kate discovers through reading that she wants to write about food because food always tells a story. This is, of course, a reference to Fay’s own vocation. As a young woman she moved to Saigon and eventually wrote Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. Kate & Frida is a Künstlerroman!² (reader, you can bet your socks I did not say this out loud).

Frida, who goes to Sarajevo and learns many unexpected things about war and about herself, represents the side of Kim Fay that enables her to be a writer. In the words of Henry James that I quote incessantly, the writer is “a person on whom nothing is lost.” But it is more than that. Becoming a writer (and the kind of reader I’m advocating here) is about being open to new things. Being open to change and growth. Gail Godwin put these words into a character in her novel The Finishing School:

There are two kinds of people. . .One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing . . . They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard, Justin, against congealing.

I first read these words over thirty years ago, and they helped to prevent my PhD in English from destroying my love for literature. Godwin gets the point of it all. We read to know that we are not alone, but we also read to find out what living life a different way might look like.

We read fiction to keep from becoming the walking dead.

1. Stay tuned: I’m going to write about this at some point!

2. A fancy German word for a novel that tells the story of a person becoming an artist.