When I was growing up, I loved to read. I remember walking to middle school, reading at the same time, and narrowly avoiding trees, squirrels, people and peripheral cars. Each weekend, I’d bike to the library, drop off a stack of finished books, and roam the shelves and aisles for hours, picking and choosing the delights that would entertain me for the coming week.

Through it all, there was one constant factor: my mom telling me to stop reading “fiction” and start reading more “non-fiction”.

Non-fiction, in my parents’ eyes, stood on a pedestal above and beyond fiction. Non-fiction was serious business. Fiction, they felt, was an ultimately futile waste of time that didn’t have any real value. Fiction, they felt, was the output of the sloppy genuflections of a fevered imagination; devoid of meaning.

As such in late middle-school and high school, I began to read more non-fiction. In the beginning, non-fiction was chosen due to circumstantial convenience. There was a copy of Alex Haley’s Roots in the basement bookshelf. The living room cabinet had editions of Hilton’s Be My Guest and Sam Walton’s Made in America. I read these, and more. Soon, I began seeking more non-fiction to incorporate into my regiment of fiction. I found Guns, Germs, and Steel, loved Watson’s Double Helix, and went through a biography phase that ranged from Michael Jordan (Playing for Keeps) to John Adams (John Adams).

But through it all, there was, again, one constant factor: the elements that make for good non-fiction reading are very nearly the same elements that make for good fiction reading.

Prose, narrative, characterization: underlying any good book—fiction or non-fiction—is the act and art of writing. And underlying the act and art of good writing is meaning.

Meaning is the emotional and mental bond that develops between the words on a page and the person reading those words. Meaning is dependent on writing is dependent on narrative is independent of subject.

And because of that loose coupling of meaning and subject, fiction or non-fiction is a secondary consideration.

Or so I thought.

In reality, I was conflating the idea of what my parent’s meant by “meaning” with the idea of “resonance”: the investment of emotional and mental energy into a work.

But at some point in the autumn days of high school, I realized what my parents really meant they said that fiction had no meaning.

It wasn’t that they felt fiction was somehow less involved for the reader than non-fiction. Nor was it that they felt fiction had less of an impact on the reader.

When they said meaning, they meant exactly one thing: truth. Truth, they thought, inherently held more meaning than the imagined untruths of fiction. The truths of non-fiction, they’d insisted, were more meaningful to read than the conjurations of fiction.

Meaning, for them, was tied directly to reality. To the world. To truth.

But I wasn’t satisfied with that. Though I’d now understood the direction my parents were coming from, the idea that a manuscript based in truth intrinsically had more meaning than a manuscript based in created inventions didn’t feel right.

It took a while to formulate my feeling in to a reasonable set of objections.