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b"Elif Batuman is a novelist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest article is \\u201cJapan\\u2019s Rent-a-Family Industry.\\u201d\\n\\n\\u201cI hear novelists say things sometimes like the character does something they don\\u2019t expect. It\\u2019s like talking to people who have done ayahuasca or belong to some cult. That\\u2019s how I felt about it until extremely recently. All of these people have drunk some kind of Kool Aid where they\\u2019re like, \\u2018I\\u2019m in this trippy zone where characters are doing things.\\u2019 And I would think to myself, if they were men\\u2014Wow, this person has devised this really ingenious way to avoid self-knowledge. If they were women, I would think\\u2014Wow, this woman has found an ingenious way to become complicit in her own bullying and silencing. It\\u2019s only kind of recently\\u2014and with a lot of therapy actually\\u2014that I\\u2019ve come to see that there is a mode of fiction that I can imagine participating in where, once I\\u2019ve freed myself of a certain amount of stuff I feel like I have to write about, which has gotten quite large by this point, it would be fun to make things up and play around.\\u201d\\n\\nThanks to MailChimp, Google Play, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.\\n\\n\\n@BananaKarenina\\n\\n\\nBatuman on Longform\\n\\n\\nBatuman's archive at The New Yorker\\n\\n\\nBatuman's archive at Harper's\\n\\n\\nBatuman's archive at London Review of Books\\n\\n\\n[1:00] \\u201cJapan\\u2019s Rent-a-Family Industry\\u201d (The New Yorker \\u2022 Apr 2018)\\n\\n\\n[10:00] The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux \\u2022 2010)\\n\\n\\n[10:00] The Demons (Fyodor Dostoevsky \\u2022 The Russian Messenger \\u2022 1812)\\n\\n\\n[11:00] The Idiot (Penguin Book \\u2022 2017)\\n\\n\\n[14:00] Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Lennard Davis \\u2022 Columbia University Press \\u2022 1983)\\n\\n\\n[20:00] The Exception (Christian Jungersen \\u2022 Anchor \\u2022 2008)\\n\\n\\n[21:00] The End of the Story: A Novel (Lydia Davis \\u2022 Picador \\u2022 2004)\\n\\n\\n[27:00] Culture and Imperialism (Edward Said \\u2022 Vintage \\u2022 1994)\\n\\n\\n[28:00] Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (Soren Kierkegaard \\u2022 Victor Eremita \\u2022 1843)\\n\\n\\n[29:00] Scrivener\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices"