I think a lot of us feel hopeful right now; I think a lot of us also feel, maybe even at the same time, exhausted. We are living in a world where we are confronted with so many high stakes battles, and we often come to public forums with the feeling that we must fight for our beliefs, our livelihoods, the safety of our families or fellow humans. When our bodies are in a state of fight or flight, one of our physiological responses is that our vision narrows—both literally and cognitively. (If you pause for a moment and try looking out of the corners of your eyes, you will likely feel your body relax! A great technique for resetting your nervous system during the day.)
For me, reading feels like a chance to shift into a different register. It widens my perspective, enlarges my capacity for empathy. I believe that one of the great powers of literature, reading and writing alike, is the opportunity to inhabit a point of view outside of one’s own. These days, we are often asked—or even required—to choose sides, and complex conversations can get flattened into two dimensions: right or wrong, black or white. In my new novel Exposure, I take a controversial accusation that feels as if it could have come hot off of the press, and look for the human beings behind the headlines (and social media storms.) By examining one life altering night and its effect across decades, from the points of view of four different characters, I hope to make space to hold each of their conflicting truths. I hope to expand the gray areas, to explore the complexities—to make space for the reader to take a breath, to move at their own pace, to digest things in their own way.
When we are fighting with someone online, or honking at someone in the car, or brushing past them on the street, we don’t see their inner life. But what if we had a window into that person’s mind, knew how it felt to be inside of their body just then, understood how their history had shaped them? What if we knew if their child had just left for college, or if their partner was battling cancer, or where they liked to play as children, or how they’d been treated at work that day, or what made them feel most loved, safest? What if they became, before our eyes, fully human? It would change the tone in which we encountered them. We may still vehemently disagree with them; we may still be irritated that they cut us off, even if it was because they were tired after a sleepless night, or grieving a dying parent. Still, we would be able to see them, speak to them, acknowledge them differently. That is one of the most wonderful things about writing or reading: it gives us a chance to know another human, even an imaginary one, in their full humanity and interiority. And when we can do that with characters in a novel, maybe it makes it a little more possible to pause and imagine the life of another person we encounter out in the world, or to simply remember that they have entire, complex universe inside of their minds, just as we each do. I believe that it is possible to hold onto, and fight for, one’s own passionately held beliefs, while still acknowledging the humanity of the people on the other side of any of the many battle lines we have drawn. When I first got the idea for Exposure, it was during the 2016 election cycle, and while much has happened in our world since then, to me, the themes of the book feel as relevant as ever. I hope the book creates a bit more space to empathize with someone who thinks or acts or sees the world differently than we do. To look for the living, breathing people who can often get buried in the noise. Because I think that the more willing we are to see ourselves and each other as the complex people that we all are—flawed, nuanced; full of deep desires, loves, fears; with families, with dreams, with intricate histories, sometimes histories of trauma—the less we reduce each other to monsters or avatars, the more it will be possible to create meaningful change in many areas of our collective lives.
