I spend all my time reading fiction but in so many ways I’m against fiction.

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I come across a paragraph I wrote several years ago. I read it with fascination, as if it is written by someone else:

“I spend all my time reading fiction but in so many ways I’m against fiction. I’m against fiction that imagines itself as crafted and seamless. I’m against characters that the reader is supposed to imagine as fully formed real people. I’m against fully formed people, believe we are all a series of fragments, that our business is a perpetually unfinished one. I have nothing against a story that playfully knows it is a story, with characters that are simultaneously people, ideas and fragments of the author, with truth that is stranger than fiction and fiction that keeps asking itself difficult questions about fiction (and life) it knows it will never be able to answer. Working within literature, this counter-position feels excessively lonely. The road less travelled is often filled with devastatingly empty moments that threaten to stretch out into a lifetime, or worse a career.”



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