Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

Story is story, Stella said. It’s a portal you walk through into another world. And this world—which usually sucks—just disappears.

All readers know that this is true! Stories are a doorway that we disappear through and enter another world entirely, something informed by but utterly separate from our own life. Real life is a mosaic — good days and bad, sorrows and joys, the mundane and the extraordinary. But a fictional world is distilled and idealized — a vivid and continuous dream to quote John Gardner.