Cassie McCullagh

I also found William Soroyan's Human Comedy, which was shelved.

I'm telling you, this was a really little local library.

It was shelved between Human Anatomy and Human Physiology, but it was the Human Comedy.

And that one I really loved.

And so I began understanding that fiction...

had a special way of talking to me that opened my world.

I mean, I've always loved nonfiction, but the sort of, the way that fiction opened the doors to me

in my heart onto other people's experiences was very compelling to me.

I wouldn't have been able to explain that to you, but I just realized I loved reading novels.

Somehow or other, I fell onto, and I don't even, I don't know how this happened, but I fell onto Doris Lessing in late adolescence.

And I read the

The Children of Violence novels.

There are five of them all together that go from Rhodesia during their sort of apartheid era into kind of Bohemian London.

And I just read those one after another.

That kind of blew out the doors in my brain because that's when I understood that fiction not only created empathy, but it also could...

address really important, really serious issues in the world.

Because Doris Lessing was talking about racism, the color bar, which it took me a while to figure out what's the color bar, but I did.

And feminism and female oppression and communism and all of these things I learned about through these characters and this character of Martha Quest, whom I just completely identified with.

Somehow her life was my life, even though she was living it alone.

way away.