But most of the writers I talk to desire not to escape the world but to enlarge it, by extending the possibilities of language. I think Amy Tan put it best: “The feeling I’m talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are,” she told me. “When I was six or seven, I used to read a thesaurus searching for the words that meant exactly what I felt. And I could never find them … When I had a feeling like sadness, I couldn’t find a word that meant everything that I felt inside of me. I always felt that words were inadequate, that I’d never been able to express myself—ever. Even now, it’s so hard to express what I think and feel, the totality of what I’ve seen. But this loneliness is the impetus for writing.”
In other words: articulating these universal experiences is a way of combatting existential loneliness, for both the writer and the reader. Anyone who’s truly loved a book knows how it can shrink the numbing distance between us. But it’s more than that. The attempt to speak where there’d been silence, or name a thing that had no name, is inherently political—is revolutionary—because, in very real ways, it expands boundaries: first of what can be said, and then of what can be done, and finally of what is possible.
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