do stories matter?

A little while ago, I received a response to my monthly newsletter that troubled me. Without greeting or introduction, a question was posed: “Why is writing fiction worth it? Why do stories really matter?” I didn’t respond. How was I supposed to answer that question? A question that has, arguably, never been answered in any concrete way? I felt overwhelmed by it, and, to be honest, the tone of the question seemed more provocative than anything else. But the thing is, in my own, small way, I do know the answer to this question, and that’s why I wanted to write something about it here. I, for instance, know that when I was living in Bath, away from my family, feeling loneliness like a physical ache, I clung to a novel called A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki as though it were a literal life raft. I felt, when I was reading it, like I could exchange some of my sadness for the sadness of the narrators. It gave me a break from my depression and helped me to process it.I know, too, that when I was studying law and wrestling with whether or not I actually wanted to be a lawyer, I was moved to tears when I encountered Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree. The final stanza, in particular, struck me, as though it’d been written for me personally:I will arise and go now, for always night and dayI hear lake water lapping with low sounds by theshore;While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavementsgrey,I hear it in the deep heart’s core.I felt as though these lines had been written for me personally because I was wrestling with my own “deep heart’s core”—with what it was saying to me, and what I was going to do about it. I know that I probably enjoyed The Confession by Jessie Burton as much as I did—seriously, it’s wonderful—partly because of how it addresses ideas about motherhood and female agency and because I’m thirty-one now and every second person I meet asks me whether I’m going to have a child in the near future. I know that I have sobbed when I’ve finished books—A Gentleman in Moscow comes to mind—not because the endings are sad but because I cannot bear to leave the characters behind. I know that I have laughed and cried along with entirely fictional people.I have buried myself in a Polish bog to hide from murderers (Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels) and I have imagined my soul as an animal and taken it into in my arms (His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman). I have whole feelings that were only ever given names by poems. (See: Sylvia Plath.)Just yesterday, I reread “Waiting” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (translated into English by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi) and was reminded, vividly, of how desperately I missed my husband when I lived apart from him for a year. It flooded me with a sort of world-tilting gratitude.Do stories “teach” us anything? Does fiction “educate”? I’m not sure if it does. Stories are, by nature, not arguments. They are experiences. Part of the reason why it’s so difficult to say why fiction is valuable and important (as valuable and important as, say, penicillin or bridges) is that they’re so hard to pin down. What do we use them for? We don’t really know their nature, just as we don’t really know ours. But there, precisely, is why we need them: stories are as complicated as we are. Poems, thank goodness, do not ever only mean one thing.So I suppose it’s going to have to be enough to say, in response to the question posed, that stories, poems and novels have been immensely “worth it” to me. They have protected me and challenged me. They have shown me to myself while also reminding me that what I see is only a tiny glimpse, one fraction, of a complex, ever-shifting whole.Yes, stories really, really matter. They matter a great deal.If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think fiction is worth it? Why do stories really matter to you? Leave a comment and let me know.