“The Invention of the Self Is Another Kind of Fiction” by Krys Lee

A piece by alum Krys Lee (fiction, ’08) appears at The Center for Fiction:

Once there was a child who hid from her father. She imagined him with blades for hands, she saw herself as strung on a leash that he owned. She was afraid, but she was eight years old and there was nowhere she could go or hide, except in the closet, where she would eventually be found. But she discovered that books were other houses to hide in, and when you read a book, you were no longer you. You were no longer an immigrant in California struck dumb by language, you were no longer a young girl. She did not ask herself if fiction mattered, but she read fiction as if it mattered. Fiction saves lives, she wrote in firmly printed letters in her diary (she had not learned cursive yet) and underlined those words. This is a true story, though the stories she wrote later when she grew up were not true, at least not in the prosaic sense.

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