It wasn’t just that any heartfelt story could be called true. It was that readers could take part in embellishing it, in making it their own. Because so many gospel stories were open-ended, she wrote, they “put pressure” on readers to become “authors and even characters.” They invite the reader—a “writer to be”—“to continue the story, tie up loose ends, fill in gaps, or create side paths,” which included “adding episodes, filling out the fate of characters [and] wholesale rewriting.” She called facts “little tyrants” and accused people who put too much stock in them of “fact fundamentalism.”
