Does Only Nonfiction Count?

My son has begun reading one of my favorite novels of all time, Paul Horgan's The Richard Trilogy. Seeing my son bent over those pages reminds me of a scene from my fourth book, a memoir called Seeing Past Z. It reminds me of a conversation my son and I had some seven years ago, when most of what I wrote was true. That excerpt here:

He works, exclusively now, at the kitchen table, his own vast kingdom. Sometimes after school, sometime late on Saturdays, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes with me sitting across from him with my own stash of things. Today I have notes and research cards spread on my side, Jeremy has colored pencils and markers on his, and I am losing myself in my own project. It takes me a moment to realize that Jeremy is doing nothing. That he is just sitting at the table, watching me.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“I’m worried,” he says.

“Why?” I say. “About what?”

“Mom,” Jeremy says after a moment, “what I want to know is this: Is it only nonfiction that counts, that makes a difference?” He makes a gesture toward my side of things—my pile of New York Times, my dictionary, my research notes. Nonfiction.

“Only nonfiction that counts?” I repeat the question. Counts, I wonder. Counts? Jeremy is not asking about personal satisfaction, not wondering whether he’d be happier with another genre. He has used the word counts, and I don’t know what he means, what kind of answer my kid is looking for.

“I mean,” he goes on, this fledgling plotter of crooked story lines, this near-master of the absurd, this writer of verve and imagination, “can only nonfiction change the world? Change people’s hearts? Change what they believe?”

“Well,” I say. “Well …” and my mind trips back to the conversation we’d been having not an hour ago—a conversation about a story that had run a few weeks before in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The story was about the death of a doctor who’d been saving lives in Africa, and the story—its very existence coupled with the power of its prose—had produced in the Times’ readers such empathy and concern that the readers had responded with a spontaneous outpouring of funds for the doctor’s family. “This is what a story can do,” I’d told Jeremy. “This is why it matters that writers give their hearts to what they write. Because stories like this can change the world sometimes, or at least make a bad thing better.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Jeremy says, because I haven’t yet responded. “Only nonfiction counts, doesn’t it? Only nonfiction can make good things happen for other people.”

“Well,” I say, and I am not stalling, I’m merely looking for the words, but he cuts me off with a sigh before I’ve produced a single fleck of counter evidence.

“Yeah,” Jeremy says. “That’s what I figured.”

“No,” I say. “Wait a minute ….”

But he’s already set his story aside and he’s packing up his things for school. We get in the car. I drive the familiar roads. We talk about lunch money and math, stay clear of his question. When we pull in to the school’s drive, I kiss Jeremy goodbye. He says, resignedly, “Love you, Mom.” Then he closes the door, and he’s gone.

Back at the house, I walk through our old few-room dwelling mulling over Jeremy’s question and kicking myself for my non-answer. Yes, I should have said, fiction too can change a heart, fiction can engender kindness and forgiveness, make someone out there care. Gut reaction. Point of fact. Politics. Fiction cures, redeems, and leavens; it preserves and it forgives. Your fiction has the capacity to affect another, I should have said. The best of fiction always does.

In Jeremy’s absence, I retreat to my long wall of double-stacked books, my own private version of a trophy shelf.... I pull some favorite volumes to the floor and sit among them. I think about all the ways I’ve been rescued by characters who only ever lived on paper. Rescued from loneliness. Rescued from boredom. Rescued from sleeplessness and sickness, tedium and trials. I think of all the sympathies fiction has generated in me, all the sudden swells of terror, heartbreak, hope, and calm that have come my way through novels, tainted my politics, held me somehow accountable to an idea or a dream, made me want to do something more extravagantly useful with my life. Fiction changes the world one reader at a time. And this is what I should have said.