The lives in the books not hers, but the pain and tangled love so often the same, creating a community of sorts. Books answered the questions she couldn’t ask people. Why can’t I save my mother? Why can’t she save herself? How can I love so much and be so angry at the same time? The protagonist could be a thousand miles or two hundred years away; it didn’t matter. In fact, in some ways the distance made it better. In some ways, reading about fictional people was like reading about animals, that little bit of distance making it all seem closer, more understandable.
