Other People's Lives

Recently I've found myself intimately involved in the lives of a retired professor of linguistics who is going deaf, a prize-winning Australian vegetarian novelist, a probably psychopathic killer with a tendency to view other as objects of art, and a forty-eight-year-old recovering alcoholic and survivor of an abusive, violent marriage.

And all of this without having to leave my chair. The magic of fiction, eh?

Paradox: why is it that leaving the prison of self to occupy another's confinement feels like a form of escape?