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For me, nonfiction has always been about the brain. If story is the motor of fiction, than the motor of nonfiction is thought. And so in nonfiction, it seems very natural that you follow your thoughts wherever they take you, even if it means going into other people’s perspectives. That’s a good thing. As people, it’s so easy for us to start feeling that people of X political party aren’t human beings—or that this guy committed murder, he should get the electric chair. It’s unfortunately easy for us as a species to place others outside the zone of what we feel comfortable calling human. But literature is an attempt to do the opposite. It’s an attempt to locate humanity where we might least expect it, an exercise in broadening the scope of what can be said to be “like us.”— Joe Fassler
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