Emotional Transportation . . .

Can I read my way into greater empathy?

Cliches in the English language make a lot of attempts at capturing our yearning to understand one another. We want to walk a mile in someone's shoes. See the world through their eyes. Sit on the other side of the desk. Don another hat. Live in another's skin.

We're not alone. Germans talk about placing oneself inside someone else. Italians speak of putting yourself in another person's clothes. Chinese has an expression that means "change positions and think."

So intimate. So demanding. Yet (insert guilty sigh of relief here) completely impossible.

We can't really do any of those things. Instead, we remain safely within our own skin, behind our own eyes, wearing our own hats, and sitting on this side of the desk.

And yet the desire persists. A yearning to understand another's perspective. To feel what she feels. Maybe it's a sense of obligation. Or simple bewilderment at someone else's behavior.

Literature has an answer for that.

Take a narrative trip

Research and personal experience suggest that stories have the power to transport us into other worlds where we not only meet new beings (human and otherwise) but, for a time, even become them. Narrative transportation is the idea that we become so immersed in a story and so absorbed by its imagery that we briefly forget ourselves. We disconnect from the world we usually inhabit and leave our baggage and biases less guarded with each turn of the page.

Our protective shields lowered, we're more open to other perspectives and more willing to reconsider our own. Our empathy is stirred, and we inch closer to someone else's lived experience.

Researchers at the University of Toronto asked students to read either a factual essay or a short story. They then measured the students' tolerance for ambiguity and their need for firm answers, what psychologists call "cognitive closure." Students who read fiction were more comfortable with uncertainty. The stories prompted them to simulate someone else's experience of the world and loosened their need to rush toward certainty.

I've seen this firsthand through the Multicultural Women's Book Group of Dallas. Our mixed-race group of women, spanning ages and life experiences, has spent nearly a decade reading books focused on race, culture and ethnicity. In that time, we've learned that fiction almost always produces richer, more nuanced and more vulnerable conversations than nonfiction.

Nonfiction can be informative, even thought-provoking, but it is rarely transporting. We remain firmly rooted in our own experience, filtering ideas through the lens of our own lives-our shoes and hats still firmly in place.

Fiction lowers barriers. White members have found ourselves less defensive and more able to accept as true what Black and Brown women tell us is their truth, their lived experience. Women of color have vulnerably shared the ways they identify with marginalized characters, while also confronting biases they see reflected in fictional characters.

Christine Seifert, a professor of communication at Westminster College, says that reading fiction builds emotional intelligence and "predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people's motivations." Fiction moves beyond simple notions of good and evil and reveals the complexity of human beings. It creates space for conversations that might not happen in any other setting, at least not with the same degree of honesty. Its immersive nature helps counter our desire for quick, tidy answers.

It's a head game

Dallas author Alex Temblador visited our book group when we read her novel, Secrets of the Casa Rosada. She both loves and fears the ways fiction transports us. As we suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in story, we become open to new perspectives. But we can also become vulnerable to misinformation, racist and sexist tropes, and simplistic caricatures that reinforce existing biases, or create new ones.

"The point of creative writing is to help people explore other viewpoints, build empathy, experience stories that help people make sense of their life," Alex shared with me recently. "If other identities are not accurately or well depicted, readers may take that distorted view and apply it to groups they see as different from themselves." That, she argues, does not encourage reflection. It gives readers permission to dismiss insights that might otherwise challenge their thinking.

Alex feels so strongly that better fiction about diverse people and experiences can help create a more empathetic world that she wrote a book about it. Her recent nonfiction work, Writing an Identity Not Your Own, encourages writers-as well as agents, editors, and publishers-to hold themselves accountable for creating nuanced characters and authentic portrayals. It also encourages readers to watch for simplistic characterizations that reinforce harmful stereotypes.

Turning the page

As an avid reader of fiction, I've experienced both what Alex hopes for and what she fears. I've felt myself empathizing with fictional characters who were enslaved people, immigrants seeking asylum, religious minorities and trans individuals. I've also caught myself judging those same characters and finding in their stories evidence to support my own assumptions.

As the University of Toronto researchers noted, literature holds remarkable potential to open closed minds. Reading slows us down. It demands focus. It invites us into someone else's stream of thought and way of seeing the world. And because those people are not us, or anyone we know, we feel less compelled to defend them, or defend ourselves against them.

For a little while, we can relax into uncertainty, into ambiguity, and into the possibility of understanding a life that is not our own. We will never truly live in another person's skin. But literature can help us get close enough to feel its warmth and texture.

That feels like a good start to me.