Have people who live cruel nasty lives ever enjoyed good fiction?

I have been going through an existential writer crisis around this question: what the hell is fiction for? Why invent people, put them into situations, when it’s all lies? It’s Fiction for fucksake. ‘Novel’ means ‘new’. So when I write a fictional novel I am producing new lies.

As if there aren’t enough old ones.

Then I watched some of the footage of ICE carrying out their terrifying project of intimidation, violence against women, children, elderly. There is absolutely nothing holding them back from their attacks. Anybody who doesn’t look like them becomes a legitimate target.

You can only do that job if you have no conscience. No empathy.

They can’t all be psychopaths.

Then I had another thought: I wonder if any of them had ever cried in a movie. Or read a novel that truly moved them. 

Maybe that’s why we read and write fiction. It’s a mutual empathy exercise. For the writer, he or she plunges into the psyche – their own and that of every person they’ve ever met. So that in that incredible, sacred space where reader and writer meet on the page, there is a precious sharing which stimulates and encourages an empathetic response.

So perhaps empathy has to be worked on. Like a muscle. The more it is stimulated the greater it gets. For both reader and writer. 

Interestingly, as I get older I seem far more vulnerable to empathy-inducers. I can’t get through a movie, book, radio play without welling up. From a lost dog poster on a tree to a friend’s bereavement, to the horrible events in Gaza and Iran. I think many older people are the same. The more you experience your empathy, the greater it gets.

If this is true, we should probably find that ICE operatives read little or no fiction, unless you count Trump’s tweets. But then very few of the outpourings of that empty vessel are likely to be mistaken for the product of a human.