"What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation"
About this Quote
Russo is staking a claim for fiction as the closest thing we have to borrowed experience. The paired questions - parent and child - aren’t random; they’re the two roles most likely to trap us in certainty. Parents romanticize sacrifice, children romanticize grievance. Each side builds a private courtroom where it’s always the other person on trial. Russo’s move is to suggest that stories don’t settle the case with facts; they smuggle you into the body of the “opposing counsel,” where your certainty gets embarrassed by intimacy.
The key distinction he draws - dramatic versus expository explanation - is a quiet jab at our modern faith in information. Exposition can tell you what happened, summarize motives, list causes. Drama forces you to sit through the messy sequence of how it feels while it’s happening: the delays, the rationalizations, the petty impulses that don’t fit a TED Talk arc. A dramatic explanation doesn’t just deliver meaning; it manufactures consequence by making you inhabit time, not just consume conclusions.
Context matters here: Russo is a novelist of ordinary American lives, a writer attuned to how families misunderstand each other in plain, everyday language. His intent isn’t anti-nonfiction so much as anti-omniscience. Stories, in his view, are empathy machines with teeth: they don’t flatter you with “understanding,” they confront you with complication. That’s why they “bring you there” - not to a moral, but to a lived contradiction you can’t easily argue your way out of.
The key distinction he draws - dramatic versus expository explanation - is a quiet jab at our modern faith in information. Exposition can tell you what happened, summarize motives, list causes. Drama forces you to sit through the messy sequence of how it feels while it’s happening: the delays, the rationalizations, the petty impulses that don’t fit a TED Talk arc. A dramatic explanation doesn’t just deliver meaning; it manufactures consequence by making you inhabit time, not just consume conclusions.
Context matters here: Russo is a novelist of ordinary American lives, a writer attuned to how families misunderstand each other in plain, everyday language. His intent isn’t anti-nonfiction so much as anti-omniscience. Stories, in his view, are empathy machines with teeth: they don’t flatter you with “understanding,” they confront you with complication. That’s why they “bring you there” - not to a moral, but to a lived contradiction you can’t easily argue your way out of.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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