"I’ve cried over characters who don’t exist, grieved relationships that were never mine, and found myself changed, softened, by the emotional truths of people born only from words. That’s the strange alchemy of fiction: it conjures lives that aren’t real but teaches us something profoundly true about the lives that are." www.littafi.com/blog/how-fiction-teaches-us-empathy-better-than-life-sometimes-can