Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.
― Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories