There are books I have loved and could not tell you why.
Not in any way that would satisfy someone who wanted a real answer. The sentences were good. The story held. But that is not why I loved them. I loved them because something happened in my chest before my brain arrived at the party. A physical thing. Unmistakable. Like catching the smell of your grandmother’s roosterkoek even though she passed away almost 50 years ago.
You know it before you know it.
John Boyne did it to me with The Heart’s Invisible Furies. A story about Ireland and identity and a life lived in full. I didn’t grow up in Ireland. I share nothing obvious with the protagonist. And yet somewhere in the first fifty pages something landed in my chest that had no business being there. Min Jin Lee did it with Pachinko. Generations of a Korean family, a world I have never inhabited, and I felt every loss like it was my own. Deon Meyer does it differently. He does it with the South African in me, the part that knows the dust and the light and the particular weight of that country’s history. And how can you not have a bit of Benny inside you if you come from the Cape? Ian Rankin does it with Rebus, a detective so flawed and so alive that Edinburgh becomes the inside of a feeling rather than a place on a map.
The first English book I ever read was The Hobbit. I was a child, reading in my second language, and Tolkien still got through. Id di not have the vocabulary but what he was carrying when he wrote it still broke through. And Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime wrote from inside a mind completely unlike his own and made it feel more true than most writers manage writing from inside their own experience.
Not one of these writers is doing the same thing. Different worlds, different voices, different everything. But they all got me in the same place.
The feeling doesn’t come from a genre or a style or a subject. It comes from a writer who went somewhere real before they put a word down.
I grew up on a prison compound in apartheid South Africa. My father was a brigadier in the prison services. Some of the prisoners who worked in our garden told me stories in the dark. I was a child. Most of those stories were stories I should never have heard at that age. I was lucky they told it anyway. I didn’t understand most of what they were telling me. But I felt every word. Something in those stories reached across everything that separated us and landed somewhere in my body before my mind could object.
That was my first understanding of what writing is. What storytelling is. Not information. Not even meaning. Feeling, transmitted from one person to another across whatever distance exists between them.
The reader’s job is to receive it. To stay open enough to let it land. To resist the impulse to immediately translate the feeling into an explanation, because the explanation is always smaller than the thing itself.
The writer’s job is harder. And stranger. And nobody warns you about the full cost of it when you start.
We have to go find the feeling first. And it is rarely waiting somewhere comfortable. It lives in the rooms we have quietly locked. The memories we have organized into manageable shapes so we don’t have to feel their original weight anymore. The grief we have processed, which is another way of saying the grief we have folded small enough to fit in a drawer. The fears we have rationalized into something we can live alongside without flinching every morning.
Writing reaches back in and opens every drawer.
Sometimes you find something still alive in there and it moves through you and onto the page and you feel it leaving and you know, or hope, the reader will feel it arriving and that exchange, that transmission across the distance between two people who will never meet, is the closest thing to magic I have ever experienced.
Sometimes you find something you sealed off for good reason. Something that needed to stay quiet to let you function. The writing asks you to unseal it anyway. Because the work requires the real thing, not the managed version. Not the story you tell yourself about the story. The original. Raw and unreduced.
And you unseal it. Because you are a writer and that is what writers do.
We dip into areas we hide from to protect ourselves. Not because we are brave. Because the work lives there and we have no choice if we want to write the true thing.
Afterwards you sit with what you disturbed. Sometimes for days. Sometimes you carry it around in your body like a bruise that nobody else can see. You gave something to the reader that cost you something to retrieve. The exchange was not equal. It rarely is.
The page holds what you could not hold alone.
But writing is also liberation. The stories that live in your head for years, pressing against the inside of your skull, asking to be let out. The feelings that have lived in your bones so long you stopped noticing their weight until you finally wrote them down and felt the weight lift. There is a particular freedom in that. In taking the thing that has been living rent free in your darkest rooms and walking it out into the light and saying, here, this is real, this happened, this is what it felt like.
The reader receives something they didn’t know they needed. The writer releases something they didn’t know they were still carrying. Imperfect, asymmetrical, occasionally painful, and the only reason I keep doing it.
We feel so the reader can feel.
And sometimes, in the writing, we finally feel it ourselves for the first time.