The Transformative Power of Story

During the year marking the end of a lonely childhood and the start of an awkward adolescence, I fell in love with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Chancing upon the novel provided the first confrontation with a character so familiar, the story seemed to reveal my deepest hopes and desires. It mattered little if fictional Jo March lived during the tumultuous years of the mid-1800s when war threatened to tear the U.S. apart, a world unfamiliar to a girl coming of age in the drug-infused, blue...