Why Fiction Matters Even More in an Irrational World

Privately, only to myself, I named this particular excursion to West Africa my “Hemingway summer.” I took six weeks off from my job as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, hopped aboard a plane from London, where I lived, to Accra, Ghana.

There, I checked into a hotel popular with locals in the center of the city. My plan: to write a novel, an extended piece of fiction, set in this romantic run-down city, endowed with funky clubs and fabulous beaches on the Atlantic coast.

The empiricist’s wall

As an empiricist, I had hit a wall. Alongside my reportage for the WSJ, I had published three non-fiction books: densely detailed and tightly organized, all of them.

One was a biography of Vannevar Bush, a man best known as the organizer of the Manhattan Project, a pioneer in the design of computers and the official science adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt.

Another book was an inside account of the making of software program at Microsoft. And the third, which I titled The Global Me, explored the relationship between plastic human identities – new hybridized ways of adapting race and ethnicity in a world of migration – and knowledge-based global capitalism.

Still searching for deeper meaning

And yet, these works still left me searching, at times, for deeper meaning about the gaps in our shared stories: gaps that fact and figures, interviews and eye-witness reports, could not fill.

So, I decided to turn to fiction in search of a different kind of wisdom – a different truth – that empirical documentation and analysis did not deliver, at least for me.

My “Hemingway summer”

My “Hemingway summer” was only a partial success, a downpayment on my desire to write from the heart as well as the head. I set aside my captivating tale of an African city undergoing a social and political transformation at the dawn of the 21st century.

Just as five years earlier, during another six-week break from The Wall Street Journal, I had written a thriller about espionage, intrigue and journalistic corruption in the belly of Silicon Valley, where I was then stationed.

An unpublished fiction writer

I remained an unpublished fiction writer, wrestling with a sense that in the realm of the imagination, my writing was not ready for publication.

My international travels, especially the dozens of visits I made in the first decade of this century to sub-Saharan Africa, reinforced my growing suspicion that empirical journalism, and even the more erudite and reflective “journalism of ideas,” was an inadequate response to what I witnessed around the world.

Dateline Botswana: Trying out humanitarian aid work

I then tried humanitarian aid work, performing research and analysis for the Bill Gates foundation.

All of my projects were set in Africa. One task, which came early in my engagement with “development philanthropy,” took me to AIDS-ravaged Botswana in 2003.

Gates and Merck, the pharmaceutical company, had chosen this landlocked, diamond-rich southern African nation to become the first in the world to receive, at no cost, anti-retroviral drugs, or ARVs. To this day, they are an effective treatment for those with the HIV infection or the active disease.

Free treatment, Merck and Gates assumed, would be embraced with enthusiasm. And yet, three months into the donor program, the pickup by infected people in Botswana was virtually nil. Only a handful of people had accepted ARVs of their own volition. My task was to understand why and explain it to the Merck and Gates folks.

The more they learned, the less open they became

By the end of my three-week visit to Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone and the country’s farther reaches, I came to a startling conclusion. The shame of contracting the virus or the disease was so enormous that virtually everyone presented with the opportunity to freely test for their status, refused to do so.

Indeed, the more a patient learned about the disease – through the intensive counseling sessions required by the donors – the less open they actually were to receiving treatment.

When shame overshadows awareness

Many Botswanans told me that their shame overshadowed their awareness that, by not testing, they were putting their lives at risk.

Initially, I responded skeptically to this insistence that shame took precedence over any urge for survival. But then one evening I became a believer.

The director of the national AIDS commission, the central player to halt the spread of the virus in Botswana, told me quietly “My own husband refuses to get tested,” she said. Evidently, shame was an overwhelming barrier to testing and treatment

From radio silence to the removal of shame

I presented my report to the donors and heard nothing back save for a perfunctory note confirming receipt.

A few months later, came big news: the president of Botswana, Festus Mogae, introduced new rules in the country’s well-funded health-care system (remember all those diamond revenues…).

From that moment on, whenever a person visited a clinic or a hospital for any reason, an HIV test was mandatory, and treatment with ARVs was mandatory – or else the patient would receive no care at all.

Suddenly, free ARVs spread widely, and over time the HIV epidemic came under control in Botswana.

Rationality is not always king

But the lesson stayed with me. Journalism and fact-based policies and practices speak to the rational side of humans. Rationality is not always king.

I remained haunted by the slippery way psychological concepts such as “shame” battled for control over individuals and societies.

Fiction as a path to wisdom?

Long after I had stopped consulting for the Gates Foundation, and after I had joined the faculties of Stanford and, later, of Arizona State University, my desire to explore those gaps in non-fiction accounts persisted.

And I returned to fiction once more, even as I prepared to publish my second history book, an edited volume of writings by my earlier biography subject Vannevar Bush.

When Columbia University Press published my volume titled Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush, I was working steadily on a new approach to fiction writing.

I was fueled by a firmer belief that fiction could deliver a kind of wisdom, of truth, not available by other means of writing and thinking.

Liberation at last

The key step for me was to shift my gaze from writing (failed) novels to (sturdier) short stories. I began to write new stories, and I reworked short fiction written earlier in my life.

The result was liberating. Under the influence of acclaimed masters of fictional realism, such as Guy de Maupassant, Joseph Conrad and Kate Chopin, I gained greater control over my fiction writing.

Pleased enough by these stories, I collected 24 of them – mostly romantic tales of adventure set in faraway places – and published them this September under the title, Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain: Stories of Innocence Lost.

My conclusion

These stories, which explore real problems by real people in the real world, are by no means a replacement for observational reporting or fact-based analysis.

But how else do we engage the undeniable gaps in rational explanation and empiricism without resorting to our imaginations and our emotional intelligence?