Fiction versus Real Life

In “The Art of the Novel,” Sajé depicts a woman whose life has centered on classic novels and their heroines. The speaker clearly loves literature and has given it an important place in her life. She writes that the plots have unfolded “with me riding shotgun” and that novels have “made my world bigger.” These images are indicative of a person who has allowed classic fiction to be a very real part of her life and who has permitted herself to be deeply influenced by what she reads. The speaker not only loves literature as a pastime, she has also made a career of writing about it. Presumably, she is a literary critic or a scholar, based on the lines “Years spent in a haze / of fiction, living through characters, writing about them, / looking for loopholes in cloth woven tight.” She seems to have...