Kidd illustrated this principle with a story from a book signing in Chicago. A 48-year-old corporate executive from New England approached her and said he hadn't wanted to read her book — after all, he was a privileged executive and the novel was about a 14-year-old girl on a Southern peach farm. His wife had made him read it. But he confessed that the characters had 'an effect on me that I can't explain. I just know that now I am more disposed to the South, to black women, and to little girls who need their mothers.' Kidd realized he had given her a better reason to write fiction than anything she'd come up with herself: because it creates empathy. Fiction lets us participate intimately in other people's lives — and if their experience is different from ours, all the better.