Vicariousness part two
Thank you for the thought-provoking comments, blogfellows. I have just a wee bit more:

1.When I read a sad story I may cry, but once I’ve shut the book the vicarious distress has had little impact on my mood or well-being. When I read about and visualise a blood-on-the-wall, evisceration crime scene, I might feel queasy, but I won’t actually retch. And where do love stories leave us but in a limbo of longing for our own?

2.As well as a processing manual, perhaps fiction can a kind of rehearsal, too. Hopefully, not in the cases of crime scenes.

3. But I wouldn’t swap the hardest, most painful times of my own life, when I did suffer and retch and feel the exhilaration of love and the heart-wrenching pain of loss. Because each time it was mine.

Finally, if thrillers had as much of an impact as real lived life, there’d be even more coronaries. (And we’d have more wrinkles and white hair, too.)

Oh, and now I'm waiting for Watherhot's 37° le matin story...