As a kindergartner, I was the first kid in my class to read a chapter book; It was Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, which is admittedly not the most thought-provoking thing a five-year-old could read. The librarian asked me if I was ready for a book with almost no pictures and more chapters than I could count. I said yes, but she didn’t believe me and waited for my teacher to come by to ask her if I could check the book out. Luckily, she said I could and so I went home, happy with a whole new world to explore.
That was probably the most important moment in my life as a reader and a writer; that moment with the ten-year-old thin copy of a children's chapter book sparked my love for what would be my escape from the hardships and inconveniences of my life. It was reading and writing fiction.
A lot of my friends liked reading non-fiction when we were kids, but I just couldn’t sit down and read a book about tree frogs as they could. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to learn because I did; it was just the way that the information was being told that just didn’t resonate with me. Yet when I was reading works of fiction that dealt with the same topics, I felt captivated by the storytelling and the way that I could interpret the information conveyed artistically really excited me.
I think that I started to love fiction for reasons that I wasn’t fully aware of. My brother was always a huge buff for nonfiction books and loved to absorb and spew out facts but I thought I was drawn to the lack of reality in fiction. As I grew up and my taste in books changed and developed, I started to realize what it was about the particular types of fiction that I found so enthralling; I saw my own reality reflected in the characters I read. All of my favorite stories, the characters that brought me back to series were ones that I related to.
In real life, it’s hard to say what you want to say and even to know what you want to say. But in fiction, you can say whatever you want in whatever way you want to. That’ a brain teaser in and of itself. In reality, people have to hide their true and authentic selves and live the life that they think that other people want them to live. But in fiction, your characters can live the life that you’ve always craved but didn’t know how to live. They can see the places that you’ve dreamt of traveling to and they can have the job and hobbies you were too busy to pursue. Fiction shrouds reality because it’s the only place to bring fantasies to life.
People-both writers and readers- often don’t want to believe some of the hard truths that reality presents and need to find a way to soften the blow. Something that always comes to my mind is when Mary Shelley originally published her groundbreaking novel, Frankenstein, there was a lot of speculation over whether or not she actually wrote it or if she was just taking advantage of a talented husband to fulfill her dreams of artistic recognition. Truthfully, a lot of people just couldn’t handle the fact that a woman in that period could be talented enough to basically invent an entirely new genre of literature. The story of Frankenstein was important to literature as a whole and also promotes the theory of intertextuality which is just that all fiction is built on each other. Mary Shelley's life and truths that she had to keep bottled up inside were the basis for her work and the way that she let out her reality was through fiction.
When I first read this prompt, I also thought of the Bronte sisters and their lives and losses. Historians and Biographers have seen and studied how the Bronte sisters all reflected their characters and events on their own experiences and turmoils throughout their sheltered childhood and how that carried out to adulthood. All three of the sisters weren’t able to publish their works under their own names so they had to use masculine pseudonyms to fulfill their dreams of people being able to read their works.
The Bronte sisters often had very controversial works and pieces of literature that society at that time was just not willing to accept. Even though they hid their masterpieces behind male names in a time of patriarchy, some critics sensed that it wasn’t a man behind some of these dark and devastating tales, but a woman. And so, even though the sisters had tried to protect their works, they had such a strong voice in their fiction, that they couldn’t hide behind their pseudonyms anymore than Mary Shelley could even publish Frankenstein with her name on it.
While, yes, there were always people and still are some who doubt if those literary gifts were given to some uneducated or wild women in the 1800’s, it’s clear to see that they did understand fiction. They couldn’t hide behind pseudonyms or their late husbands because their fiction did exactly as it was supposed to; it revealed their truths and the reality of their lives shone through so strongly that it became undeniable who the mothers of their novels were. They did exactly what fiction needs; they experienced a fundamental truth and based their literature on what they learned and what they still had to seek out in life.
What I’ve realized about fiction throughout my own experiences and learning about other authors is that fiction is based on real life. I have always surrounded myself with a lot of female authors and their literature, and I didn’t realize it at first but it was their relatability and ability to convey characters that I saw my self and struggles reflected in that drew me so much to their stories. From seeing some of Victor's inner turmoils with isolation to Junie B. Jones trying to outsmart a schoolyard bully, I’ve always craved fiction that I knew and could learn from. Literature made it easier for me to understand the problems and solutions that I needed in my life because it gave me a less personal, yet equally powerful lens to view the world with.
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