My Favorite Terrible Thing

by Madeleine Henry

“You need to rip your story out of real life.” She said that all tensions in a novel, all emotions, have to come from somewhere real in order to resonate with people. “Careful,” she warned, “because if you do it right, you might rip yourself out of the real world too.”

“Do you know what reading is?” she continues. “If you boil it down, what it really is? It’s giving up control of your mind. When you read my book, you lent your inner voice to me—