On fiction and the id

September 7, 2026

Working on my current story, I found my way quite incidentally to a succinct articulation of why it is I love a particular trio of narratives. They are Miramax’s Chicago (I haven’t seen the Broadway show), Wendy MacLeod’s The House of Yes (I saw Custom Made Theater’s 2017 production in San Francisco; there’s also a movie), and the 2018 Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick vehicle A Simple Favor.

What I wrote today, as I wrote, was this:

Let the bourgeois and the Christian install taboos, he thinks. The noble and the excellent are above conventions.

That is: I’m drawn to fictions that flout social pieties. The three stories I listed don’t even tread them underfoot, social pieties. They simply wave them languidly away, insignificant as gnats. Chicago has murderesses who not only go unpunished but are rewarded for their crimes; The House of Yes has incest (twincest since the womb!); and A Simple Favor has a version of each. Attempting to define the shared quality I saw across these stories, I called them amoral. The word is apt, but not sufficient. I did better today, I think, naming their opposite ethos bourgeois and Christian. Let the bourgeois and the Christian hand-wring and pearl-clutch, says the aristocrat. I’ll be here enjoying my life of sin.

Megan Abbott and Gillian Flynn hit similar notes, to each other as well as to Chicago and the others. Abbott I love to pieces though I’m running three novels behind. My favorite of the ones I have read is The End of Everything, for the series of reversals and reveals that culminate and close the book. The first of them is that the girl who was abducted? Actually sought out her admirer, stepped up to his car, went with him willingly. And when, after the motel days they spent together, he dropped her off at home? This is the way she tells it later:

“He was so calm, like he never was. I had the car door open, and I was looking at him, and it was the longest minute.

“And then he said, No one will ever love you like this again, and I knew he was right.”

What do you do with a love like that?

What do you do with a revelation like that?

What do you do with a book like that?

I love fiction for giving us a place to be fucked up. For giving us permission to articulate and uphold values we can’t indulge in the real world, because in the real world we’re not monsters. For giving us a sandbox in which our id can play with impunity.

Fiction allows us, too, to make the fucked up beautiful. Hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers bemoaning the aestheticization of violence and the glorification of sex miss the point. The point is the glory, the beauty. More of it is always better.

That’s an absolute I live by. ♡