One of the many reasons I love creative nonfiction and chose to create this brand with creative nonfiction essays at the core of it, is because hearing stories of other people’s worldview and experiences widens the reader’s worldview too. It is easy to paint an entire group of people with a wide brush and dismiss them as a monolith to all the stereotypes you hear about them. It is harder to hold onto those stereotypes when you are invited into someone’s story and hear their pain or connect with their shared experiences and journey.
In 2023, I enjoyed reading many books, hearing from different authors through my local library’s speaker series, and joined a local writing group. It was wonderful to be exposed to new stories, ideas, and perspectives, so I wanted to share some of the books I read that promote empathy.
In “Educated” Tara Westover writes about growing up in a family that feared the outside world and eschewed public school education of any kind. The author explores her thirst for knowledge as she wrestles with the ideas taught in her family home, particularly with a father who had undiagnosed mental illness. As she slowly moves further into the world of education, it also means the severing of ties with her family over time, which process does not come easily, because most of her family sees her embracing of education as alienation of their core beliefs.
My sister recommended this book to me and bought a copy for me from a library sale to read while I convalesced from a surgery last year. We both highly value our own education and could also recognize some of the themes in the book in our own family growing up. Not in the sense that our parents kept us from seeking an education (we all attended public school), but in some of the “government is evil, don’t trust anything the establishment tells you” ideas that certain members of our family adopted as we got older. It was difficult to read in parts for that reason, even though I could not put the book down and read it in two days. It hit close to home, but was also hard to feel the fear and social alienation that the author experienced as she grew up. This is a good book to read for growing empathy, because Tara Westover does a beautiful job in drawing the reader into the complicated feelings she had towards her family members, and the growth she experienced as her mind and spirit grew thanks to her journey into learning.
Phoebe Robinson is a humorous writer with a strong and clear writing voice. This book is a series of essays exploring her journey as a Black woman in America in the areas of running her own company, her relationships, her experience during the pandemic and other such topics. There are side notes scattered throughout the essays which offer further funny comments that add an informal, stand-up comedy pace to the stories. The author is in fact, a stand-up comedian, as well as an actress, writer and producer, NY Times bestselling author, and a hit podcast cocreator/costar. I recommend Phoebe Robinson’s book for my list of books that promote empathy, because she covers a variety of topics that offer insight into the diverse experience of being a Black woman in America as she leads her successful businesses and projects, chooses not to have kids, and navigates a happy relationship with a White man from England while quarantining during the pandemic and facing the feelings and conversations that arise about Black Lives Matter. She also discusses the complicated relationship all of us Americans have with the commercialized concept of “self-care” and when she faces meeting with the esteemed Michelle Obama, Robinson explores her own experiences with her hair while surrounded in a White people’s hair centered culture.
In this book, J.D. Vance describes the life he experienced growing up in his White Appalachian working class family in rural Ohio. This is another book recommended to me by my sister that I read during my surgery recovery in 2023, and I chose it to include it on this list of books that promote empathy, because I myself struggle with feelings of confusion regarding the collective mindsets of the people described in this book. For me, reading it was a good example of being confronted with the stories of people you don’t understand and sitting long enough to at least understand their perspectives even if you still don’t agree with their worldview or political conclusions in the end. As someone who grew up moving throughout many regions of the USA and coming into contact with many different sub-cultures along the way, I found it particularly interesting when Vance described the migration patterns of the Appalachian people from Kentucky to Ohio and South Carolina and other parts of the Midwest as the people attempted to follow the industrial jobs and escape poverty. He states that even though his family did travel around for vacation, he realized as an adult, that they mainly stayed in places that are considered part of the “Hillbilly Highway”, so he was not exposed to many outside groups that were unlike him until later in life. Like in the book “Educated”, Vance credits his education experience with shaping his worldview, exposing him to new ideas and people, and sending his life on a trajectory that many of the people in his community were unable to experience.
I bought this book in 2015 and then it was in a box of books in storage until I was able to unpack them in late summer 2023. While I have always had a particular interest in learning about World War II and the Holocaust, I hesitated to read this book, because I have difficulty recovering after diving deep into people’s traumatic stories. I chose a sunny day to sit on the porch and read this relatively short narrative all the way through. The style was surprising to me, because the language is sparse like minimalist interior design in written form. Elie Wiesel had a background in journalism, which is evident in the prose, but also I read that when he was finally able to approach writing his story, Wiesel had to write it plainly to get through the process. Nothing about the Holocaust or Wiesel’s experience in particular needs extra flourishes in the telling of it anyway, because the nature of the stories are gruesome and heartbreaking even in the plainest of language. I cried once, when the violinist who dared to play Beethoven was discovered dead with his violin by his side. As with all Holocaust stories I have read, I was shaken by the lengths that humanity can go to inflict sheer terror and harm on their fellow humans, but Elie Wiesel weaves an even more stark image since he demonstrates from the beginning that the man in his community came back to warn the people that this evil was coming, but no one listened. Even as the Jewish people were segregated, then restricted, then packed into trains, moved to a new location, Wiesel described how the people around him acclimated to the insanity of the situation until it was unimaginably inhumane, because it is inherently so difficult to fathom people choosing to treat their fellow humans in such evil ways, the truth didn’t sink in until it was too late.
With my degree in Creative Non-fiction, I gravitate towards the non-fiction essay section of any bookstore, and one day I was perusing a used bookstore in Philadelphia when I came across this book. The title caught my eye first, and even though I hadn’t remembered reading anything of Ann Patchett before, I brought the book home. The author delved much in fiction writing during her career, so it was interesting to read about her gradual foray into non-fiction through her commercial work before embracing the essay form. The essays in this book cover her experiences with each of her parents, the story about deciding to open a local bookstore, and, as her title piece describes, the unfolding of her relationship with her husband. As far as inspiring empathy, I was particularly interested in her essays which told the story of her friendship with a woman named Lucy who inspired her and challenged her in many ways. Patchett includes a few essays describing how a portion of the conservative public took a strange opposition to her story about this platonic relationship and the life of her dear departed friend. In this book, Ann Patchett includes a speech she delivered at a university that tried to ban her from coming to speak due to layers of misunderstanding and hearsay in regard to the story of Lucy. I loved this collection of essays, because it is indicative of how sharing the everyday experiences of relationships, choices, and changes can challenge audiences to look at their own lives in the proverbial mirror and make deeper connections to their own stories. Like Patchett urges the college audience in her speech, it is important to hear or read the stories first-hand from the original sources before deciding to ban the voices of people you may not understand due to lack of exposure.
FRAGILE HUMAN 