When fiction shrinks to memoir we all lose out - Dina Nayeri

We’re told that discretion equals compassion, but has this ever been true, in life or in literature? That we should bury character flaws in complex protagonists if those blemishes – however empathetically rendered – might fuel racist, xenophobic, or other hateful rhetoric. And yet, survivors understand viscerally how disturbing and uncomfortable and idiosyncratic the truth can be. When you’ve run for your life, you’ve likely made a few ugly choices. We think we are defending survivors with our demand for purity, but we are only making them feel less believable, dirtier, less worthy of rescue.

A story about torture should trigger us and make us afraid – the characters are terrified. A narrative neutered of its ugly detail is false. And why do we crave these safe narratives? Because we’ve quarantined ourselves from the worst and are too cowardly to read a story that confuses and hurts – that truly, wonderfully, transformatively hurts. We’re afraid of stories that make us grieve the suffering of unworthy characters. Relating to the discrepant reminds us that we, too, are unclean. In his brilliant essay A Moral Education, Garth Greenwell writes “I am a novelist because I think it is hard not to be terrible”. Later he writes a sentence that I’ve pinned above my desk. “A moral education depends not on condemning or averting our gaze from filth, the novel suggests, but on diving wholeheartedly into it.”

Link to Dina Nayeri's website