Shortly after the publication of her debut novel, Shanna Hatfield received her first letter from a reader. She claimed that the first line instantly made her cry. It came from a young mother suffering from postpartum depression who, according to her own story, had come to the conclusion that she had nothing left to live for. She had received a Kindle from a friend. In the darkest moments, on the periphery of a life that seemed to be falling apart, she had begun reading. She discovered what she called “courage” within the pages of a romance book. On the other side, she climbed out. To express gratitude, she wrote.
That’s an amazing story, but once you start looking, it’s also not that uncommon. The specifics—the illness, the loss, the specific book, the specific reader—vary, but the fundamental form is consistent throughout centuries and cultures and is hard to write off as a coincidence. In times of crisis, people turn to stories. They have consistently done so. Why, precisely, and whether the response goes beyond sentiment are the questions worth pondering.
The neurological explanation is sufficiently specific to be helpful. The brain releases oxytocin, a hormone most frequently linked to social bonding and trust, when a person is truly engrossed in a story—following a character through hardship and feeling the emotional weight of what happens to them. Cortisol, the hormone that floods the body during stress, tends to decrease at the same time. Measurable physiological changes toward calm are produced when reading at a deep level of engagement. Researchers studying the biology of storytelling have been finding this for years, and it neatly aligns with what readers have been reporting in their own less clinical language for much longer. This is probably not what the publishing industry has traditionally led with as a marketing argument.
Beyond the chemistry, psychologists refer to the use of stories—both told and heard—to help people organize experiences that are too painful or chaotic to retain in their original form. This technique is known as narrative therapy. Trauma is inherently incapable of taking on a coherent form. It comes in the form of sensations, fragments, and abrupt intrusions. Storytelling imposes a structure—beginning, middle, and potential turning point—on both the storyteller and the listener. Although it makes it readable, that structure doesn’t make the pain go away. In a piece for BookTrib, a writer by the name of Corey Rosen explained the process with remarkable clarity, pointing out that we only truly comprehend our lives in retrospect—not while things are happening, but in the narrative we create about them afterwards. According to him, survival resides in that space between living and explaining.
It’s difficult to ignore how much this resembles reading fiction about adversity. The reader is not merely observing when a character in a book loses something priceless and manages to carry on, no matter how flawed. Something more akin to involvement is taking place. Researchers have discovered that the brain cannot clearly differentiate between experiencing and witnessing an emotional event. When the grief and recovery belong to a nonexistent person, the same neural circuits that process real grief and real recovery become active. From a neurological perspective, this is practice. In some tiny but quantifiable way, the reader who has followed a character through loss has practiced surviving it.
When discussing the craft of hopeful fiction, Hatfield took care to differentiate between stories that provide hope and those that merely sidestep challenges. The difference is important. No one is prepared for anything by a story that maintains the comfort of its characters. The kind of story where the character confronts a real, weighty issue and discovers a capacity within themselves that they were unaware of is what readers seem to find sustaining—the kind of story that arrives in a letter saying you saved a life. In a story like that, the hope is not ornamentation. The story’s thesis is that endurance is achievable and has been accomplished by someone who was just as exhausted as you are right now.
There’s a thread running through all of this that connects ancient storytelling around fires to the Kindle propped on a hospital pillow — the fundamental human use of narrative as a kind of shared survival training. Narratives spread the knowledge of how to overcome obstacles. They give language to experiences that haven’t been named yet. They model the possibility of going wrong and still continuing. When someone tells the story of their worst year and how they came out the other side, whoever is listening receives something that instructions alone cannot deliver — not a rule, but a felt sense that the path through exists, that someone has already walked it. Stories are how that knowledge travels. They always have been, and it’s possible that in an era of increasing collective difficulty, that function is more necessary than ever.
Chloe Olliver is senior editor at vclib.org, where she leads editorial coverage of literary criticism, political commentary, cultural analysis, and the evolving relationship between literature and public life across New York City and beyond. With a career spanning the intersection of literary journalism, political commentary, and educational publishing, Chloe brings both rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an accessible editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant.