Several years ago, I received a note about my first novel, “The Gin Closet,” which is, in part, the story of a middle-aged woman and her prolonged decline into alcoholism:

“I picked up this book at a thrift store for 10 cents. That’s right and it was the worst 10 cents I ever spent. So depressing and it placed me in a horrible place. Back to drinking and taking drugs. Even tried to slit my wrists. A terrible dark story about nothing worthwhile. No inspiration or hope anywhere. You should be ashamed of yourself. No good will ever come of this book.”

Did this woman try to slit her wrists because of my book? I don’t believe that — or I try to quiet the part of myself that might have believed that for a moment. But maybe she’d hoped my book could persuade her not to try. And then it hadn’t. It had failed to save her from herself — and in that failure, it had become the emblem and instrument of something in her that she was struggling against. She was showing me the toxic aftermath of that disappointment.

I realize I’d come to believe that novels full of pain would always offer consolation, would always make people feel less alone in whatever pain their own lives already held — because it had always worked like that for me. But I began to see that it could also work another way: There could be a yearning for hope, for an alternative, for something more positive — for consolation as difference, not echo — and the failure to provide that alternative could feel like betrayal, like permission to destroy, like a promise of what might never change.

Leslie Jamison is the author of an essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her first novel, “The Gin Closet,” was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; and her essays and stories have been published in numerous publications, including Harper’s, The Oxford American, A Public Space and The Believer.

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By Francine Prose

For some reason my father believed Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” would inspire me to lead a dissolute life.

Image Francine Prose Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

As a child I was an omnivorous reader. I read every book in the house, and after I’d exhausted the children’s section at the public library, I persuaded my parents to borrow, for me, books intended for adults. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about what was “appropriate” for someone my age, and early on I was encouraged to read far above what was not yet commonly called my “grade level.” The only books I recall my parents forbidding me to finish were Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (it was giving me nightmares that kept the whole household awake) and Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which for some reason my father believed would inspire me to lead a dissolute life.