Read ’em and leap: Charles Assisi on the shift from non-fiction to fiction

Where books rooted in reality offer clarity, direction and data, I’m realising those that spin a yarn embrace the fog we walk through every day.

For most of my life, I have read to understand: Policy papers, books on business, biographies of men who built empires and believed they’d figured out how the world works.

Free your mind: At the Jedi Archives, in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), a set inspired by the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin.

Those pages spoke in the language of clarity and logic. I liked that, and still do.

Fiction, on the other hand, made me uneasy. There was too much left unsaid and too little that could be measured. It often felt like I was wandering through a fog without a compass. I missed the clean, straight lines of non-fiction, with its clear conclusions and comfort of closure.

My bookshelves, then, were neat rows of certainty. But that’s a problem as well, as someone close to me once said.

She pointed out that if I could look at the shades, listen to the unsaid, and stop trying to measure and quantify, I would encounter a different kind of depth. I told her I’d give it a pass.

Then, some days ago, The Cost of Living, the South African writer Deborah Levy’s 2018 “memoir on modern womanhood” (inspired by her life), found me. To be clear, I don’t go looking for books like this. But some volumes simply walk into one’s life unbidden, with a certainty to their pages that cannot be ignored.

I stumbled upon this one at home, and started to read it on a Saturday evening. I smirked a bit internally as I began, and would have been willing to wager I’d stop reading after a few pages. But there is a magic to Levy’s writing. Not a word is out of place. This is not the voice of someone boastful. Instead, it is clear that this book could only have come from a woman who had walked through a storm and learned how to breathe again, on the other side of it.

Each sentence carries a kind of earned quiet.

A few pages in, a line I’ve seen a few hundred times before hit me with new impact: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken,” Levy quoted Oscar Wilde as saying.

It’s a quote that has been flattened into wallpaper, printed on mugs, stitched into tote bags, and recycled endlessly. Normally, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But because she had cited it, I knew there had to be more. What hidden textures was she hinting at?

Out of habit, I copied the line into ChatGPT and it started to explore what Wilde might have meant. It broke the line down word by word, until something unexpected emerged: to be oneself isn’t a slogan. It is a cost. It’s the price of living without disguise in a world that keeps handing one masks.

And there it was, the irony of it all: A machine had helped me feel what I would never have stopped long enough to feel on my own. My friend laughed when I told her that.

I sat with her laughter for a while. That’s when I realised how much of my reading life had been about extracting meaning. Non-fiction has trained me to mine books for answers. Fiction, I could suddenly see, doesn’t offer answers. It holds out a mirror.

As I continued to read Levy’s book, I began to revel in the stillness of her sentences. I came across another line that refuses to leave me, her own this time: “Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”

I put the book down and stared into the dark for a while. Outside, the city was quiet. Everyone who has ever tried to live truthfully, to choose love over duty, silence over noise, or their own path over what’s expected, would know what Levy means. Freedom sounds noble. But when you live it, it takes something from you. It asks for courage. It asks for consequence.

Suddenly, Wilde’s line wasn’t just a clever quote any more.

Maybe that’s what good fiction does: It addresses not the questions or the gaps in one’s knowledge, but the hidden humanity we so easily lose sight of.

I’m trying to read differently now. Go slower. Be more open to getting lost. Because I realise fiction was never meant to lift the fog. It was meant to teach us how to walk within it.

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)