In his Connecticut College address, Lamb made a passionate case for the power of storytelling and literature. Drawing from his experience teaching writing to incarcerated women, he had witnessed firsthand how fiction could unlock truths that facts and statistics alone could never convey. Lamb argued that when we read fiction, we inhabit other lives — we experience poverty, injustice, love, and loss from the inside. This imaginative act of empathy is something that news reports and data sets cannot replicate. He urged the graduates to keep reading, to keep telling stories, and to recognize that the 'made-up' world of fiction often gets closer to the essential human experience than any documentary account.