Fiction is truth, only less strange

The benefits of reading fiction, and an accidental ode to Harry Potter

I’ve been trying to read more fiction again. Outside of top bestsellers on Amazon, it’s been hard to find lesser known gems lost in the undercurrent of social media algorithms and regurgitated reviews. 

To rekindle this old love, I’ve found that going to actual bookstores can be more of a visceral experience than you’d imagine. There’s something about them for me that is akin to seeing beautiful guitars hanging lazily in a music store.

Being lost in a fictional world is the most convenient way to get out of your own head, or at least how it used to be for me before. That, and music. 

Until I was out of college, I’d mostly just read the Harry Potter series over and over. To be honest, I still read them all the time. 

Reading them as a teenager was quite different though; today I can appreciate in greater depth the subtle life experiences that are woven artistically into storytelling. How profoundly life lessons can be wrapped snugly in a story about magic: that can be relatable both to children and adults, as though looking through opposite ends of a pair of binoculars.  

Concise and fleetingly noticed as a child more interested in Expelliarmus! and Quidditch, but available in much higher resolution, when read as an adult about the darkness of the Dementors. 

Learning about loyalty and friendship. Wishing for my own Ron and Hermione. Relating to Harry’s life, his being unassumingly unaware of his own strength and talents—to starting to believe in magic and looking for it in my everyday life—these are some of my childhood memories that I owe to Harry Potter. I once called someone I didn’t like “mad and hairy!” (like Aragog). Played all the franchise video games on my first PC, the Playstation 2 and the Playstation 3. I grew up alongside Harry, and so my books have grown older with me. Harry might have even influenced my hair (it wasn’t Tom Cruise, my nosy, pretending-to-be-kind neighbor!) and choice of glasses as an early teenager. Most of the fancy words I flaunt on my Substack came from these books.

By my side, always.

I bought Chamber of Secrets from my school book exhibition in the 7th grade, and that taught me what a novel is, the first real book I owned outside my school bag. And then, Prisoner of Azkaban on vacation in Mussoorie. I hounded my local Oxford bookstore every week to check for Order of the Phoenix. And with much mourning, Deathly Hallows from Shimla, before my parents dropped me off for college. I spent the first week of college hiding in my hostel room while devouring it to the end, glad of an excuse not to have to leave the safety of my room. Read it twice, actually.

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Maybe there’s more value in reading fiction than most contemporary self help literature out there right now. People and their emotions are subjects of delicate intricacy, and only the ones with the eye to spot, and the gift of being able to describe them in excruciating and accurate detail can give you a mirror to find your own reflection in the author’s imagination. Just to learn about the plethora of human experience and conditions, through storytelling born from the masters.

Your personal despair, hopes, fears, and thoughts may not be so different from that of a character in a novel, if only you could find the right one. I used to wonder how a two second real life interaction can be mulled over two long pages that take fifteen minutes to read. The only right way to preserve a memory so intricately would probably be in those yellowing pages. I don’t know if that's what empathy is all about, but I sure learned to build a rich inner world because of that. Along with a strong imagination for feelings, thoughts and an ability to construct faces, figures and architecture from humble words. 

What a thing of beauty it must be, even if slightly terrible sometimes, to be able to take real joy and sorrow and turn it into a fictional work of text! To camouflage your own or someone else’s story and deliver it under some pretext you can conjure out of thin air and be a messenger of it. 

To have a humble book act like a personal god for your redemption; a radio for your anguished dreams and desires to be accepted as imagination—that tragically could have been lost, or worthless being real.¹  

And what better way to understand human psychology, than to read about it in these timeless documentations of the spectrum of humanity? If you can’t be an expert at telling your own story well enough, maybe you can benefit from the masters who did it, for you. Most of what a human can go through has probably been richly documented in literature, those chunky, dusty books you’re using as lamp stands right now. Just so you can depersonalize your own experience, escape the pain and embarrassment of holding public responsibility for it, yet find solace discreetly in the quiet corner of your bedside. Safely tucked under a blanket.

So—take advantage of someone else’s imagination born from true stories, and learn from it what you will. 

One voice can cut through a thousand noises that may have refused to pierce your heart, and hold the key to finding redemption and understanding your own life. So I choose to trust in fiction more than any self proclaimed harbingers of truth or wisdom, and recommend you try the same.

For they say that truth is stranger than fiction—what if fiction is just then the truth, only less strange?

1. Here’s Margaret Atwood speaking about this in her writing Masterclass.