September Theme: The Stories We Carry
Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?
Week 1: The Books That Changed Us
👋Welcome to our first dialogue in September!
This month, our drafts and dialogues will be centered around the theme, The Stories We Carry. And throughout the month, we’ll be asking ourselves a deceptively simple question: Why do certain stories stay with us?
To kickstart the month, we’re exploring The Books That Changed Us, focusing on the ways stories have affected our work, our lives, and the creators we’re becoming, in both profound and surprising ways.
Yet before we start reflecting on the specific books that have stayed with us over the years, I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider whether books can genuinely change who we are at all, because how is such a thing possible?
Of course, avid readers and storytellers such as us want to believe that stories are unlimited in their capacity to move us and change us, and our world as a result, especially right now. Especially me! It’s no coincidence that I’ve written about this topic (the power of storytelling) multiple times in the past and will likely do so again in the future.
But if stories can truly change us, how do they change us?
And is it possible to harness and control such a thing on purpose? Or is this lay belief we have in the power of storytelling just based on wishful thinking, or some unpredictable force we’ll never be able to define let alone manage or control?
Sure, we all know that serendipitous feeling of reading a book at the exact time we need to read it in our lives. That book that helped us navigate grief or a new stage in life or a difficult relationship or something else that was hard to face or overcome. That book that helped us feel seen and cared for, or that simply entertained us, when we felt maligned or alone. That book that made us laugh or have hope when we were in a state of despair. And so on.
But do those cherished reading experiences mean that books themselves actually have the power to change who we are at our core?
Full disclosure: I don’t see this dialogue ending with a clear-cut answer with irrefutable empirical data, even where such data may exist in bits and pieces. Yet at the same time, I do wholeheartedly believe that there is only one answer that makes sense, to me at least. Which is why I know this topic and question is worth exploring further.
Regardless of what your initial answer or instinct is when responding to today’s question, I hope it spurs some much-needed reflection and discussion regarding the affect and effects of the books that have the potential, dare I say the ineffable yet distinct power, to move us… maybe even change us… in profound and life-altering ways.
Participate in today’s poll, then take a moment to consider today’s question and the different responses to it outlined below. Then let us know more about what you think in this month’s Dialoguers Chat as you continue to reflect. As always, remember that there are no strict ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, only those answers that will help us more authentically navigate this dialogue.
Cast your vote, then keep reading. You may find yourself agreeing with one answer at first then questioning it at the end, as you continue to engage in reflection and dialogue.
Drafting this Dialogue: The Books That… Change Us?
Yes, completely. A book can genuinely change who we are.
There is a powerful case to be made that books can transform us in ways that reach far beyond their entertainment value or the information they teach us. A compelling story that reaches us at the right time in our lives can introduce a possibility we had never considered, challenge a belief we had never questioned, or give us language for something we were feeling deeply but struggling to articulate.
Fiction can allow us to inhabit another person’s consciousness and take a walk in their shoes and worldview, while nonfiction can give us an entirely new framework for understanding ourselves, others, and the world. So, in this sense, reading the right book at the right time can expand the boundaries of what we know and who we believe we are and can be within its framework or perspective.
The type of personal transformation a book offers is often gradual, however, and doesn’t necessarily turn us into a different person overnight. More often, a book first changes the direction of our attention, slowly altering what we notice, what we value, what questions we ask, or what we believe is possible, as well as what we want to read next.
Yet one book can also become a before-and-after marker in a person’s life. We may remember where we were when we read a book that affected us deeply, precisely what we were struggling with when we read it, and how the world or people in the world looked slightly different to us when we finished reading it. And those books can become part of our personal history because their ideas, characters, images, perspectives, and questions become part of the person we are becoming as we carry them forward.
If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:
A book can introduce an idea that fundamentally changes the way we understand ourselves or the world around us.
“Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.” — Toni Morrison
A powerful story can make another person’s experience feel emotionally real enough to change how we respond to people in our own lives.
A book can give us the courage to make a decision that we might not otherwise have considered.
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel —or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel— is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
The books that transform us often meet us at a particular moment when we are already searching for something we cannot yet name or fully understand.
A book can change not only what we think, but also what we notice, value, question, and imagine.
“You live several lives while reading.” — William Styron.
To engage in further dialogue, ask:
Can you identify a book that changed a decision you made in your life, even if that decision was made years after you read the book?
What is the difference between being temporarily inspired by a book and being genuinely transformed by it?
Can a book change us if we strongly disagree with its author or characters?
Does the timing of when we read a book matter more than what’s in the book itself?
If a book changes how we see the world but never changes how we behave, has it truly changed us?
Yes, conditionally. A book can change who we are, but with a few conditions.
A book may contain transformative ideas or perspectives but reading it does not guarantee that it will transform its reader. The reader brings a particular history, set of beliefs, emotional states, and level of readiness and understanding to every book they sit down to read. Which makes the reader’s experience and perspective as important, if not more important, than whatever is contained in the book itself.
The same story can profoundly affect one person and barely register with another due to the different perspectives its readers bring to the table. The same reader may even experience the same book differently at different stages in their life. For example, what feels irrelevant to a reader at twenty may feel essential to that same reader when they read the same book at forty because they have become a different kind of reader with different life experiences and perspectives.
Transformation in this context also requires something beyond mere intellectual awareness and literary pattern recognition. A book can offer a new way of writing and or thinking, but readers themselves must decide whether to examine its ideas, wrestle with the questions and perspectives it poses, and whether or not they want to continue carrying the story being told in the book with them.
Readers bring their own instincts, reasoning, and conclusions to what they read, but can also remain unmotivated or unreceptive to exploring everything a book can offer them. In other words, a book may open a door to its readers, but the readers themselves still have to decide to walk through it. So, in this sense, books can be catalysts for change without being the sole cause of it.
If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:
A book can offer the possibility of transformation, but the reader must be willing to examine what the book is asking of them or presenting to them first.
We are more likely to be changed by a book when its ideas intersect with questions we are already asking in our own lives.
“Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.” — Maryanne Wolf
Reading actively (by taking notes and asking questions about what we’re reading), rather than simply consuming a story or book, makes it more likely that that story or book will influence our thinking, and maybe even who we are.
A transformative book often requires us to revisit its ideas after we have had time to test them against our own experiences and beliefs.
“The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts.” — Virginia Woolf
The real-world actions we take after reading may determine whether a powerful insight in a book or story becomes a lasting change in our lives and who we are.
“Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way ... to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.” — Julia Alvarez
To engage in further dialogue, ask:
What makes you receptive to a book’s message at one point in your life but resistant or ambivalent to it at another?
Does reading with the intention of changing something about yourself or what you believe make transformation more likely, or does it interfere with the experience?
What responsibility does the reader have for turning insight from a book into real-world action?
Can a book be transformative even if you reject some or most of its central ideas and perspectives?
What conditions need to be present in your life before a book can truly reach you or transform you?
No, a book can only mirror us as we already are inside.
Books don’t fundamentally change us at all. Instead, their greatest power lies in helping us recognize and harness what is already within us and what we already believe or want to come true.
When a book feels unnervingly personal, it’s probably because the author has somehow held up a mirror to something that we already believe or understand, allowing us to see ourselves more clearly for a moment in time through their words. A book or story read at the right time can give shape to an emotion we already feel, provide language for an experience we have endured yet struggled to understand, or reveal a deeply held value we have sensed but never been able to consciously articulate before.
From this perspective, the apparent transformation we experience happens because the book awakens something deep within us, not because it generates a new narrative outside ourselves to follow. In other words, the capacity for empathy, curiosity, courage, grief, ambition, wonder, etc. was already present within us, and the story or book we read simply allowed those qualities to surface as we read it.
Even when a book seems to introduce us to an entirely new perspective, what it’s really doing is revealing our deeper capacity to imagine and pay attention to what we already have inside us. The book becomes an instrument of recognition, a mirror, in this sense, but doesn’t put something inside us that isn’t already there. Instead, it helps us discover what was there all along.
If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:
The books we love often tell us as much about ourselves as they tell us about their subjects.
“The only true voyage of discovery ... would be to possess other eyes.” — Marcel Proust
A reader’s emotional response to a story can reveal beliefs or desires that were previously outside their conscious awareness.
“A book is more than a verbal structure ... it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader.” — Jorge Luis Borges
Two people can read the same book and experience completely different encounters or transformations because each reader brings a different self to its pages.
“The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.” — Vladimir Nabokov
A book may feel life-changing because it gives us words for something we already knew intuitively.
Returning to a beloved book years later can reveal how much the reader has changed, even when the words on its pages literally remain the same.
To engage in further dialogue, ask:
Have you ever believed a book changed you, only to realize later that it helped you understand something you already felt before you read it?
When a story feels deeply personal, does that necessarily mean it has changed you?
Can a book reveal something about us that we genuinely didn’t know was there?
How much of what we take from a book comes from its author, and how much comes from us, the reader?
If every reader creates a different experience of the same book, where does the book’s transformative power actually reside?
No, only real-world experiences can genuinely change who we are.
From this perspective, books can influence our thinking, but they can never be a substitute for lived experience. For example, we can read about grief without having lost someone we love, or read about how to be courageous without ever having faced real danger, or read about someone starting over without knowing what it takes first-hand to rebuild a life ourselves. And so on.
In this sense, then, a book can prepare us for an experience, help us imagine it, and give us the language we need to talk about it, but the real-world experiences we face outside of books will always be what ultimately tests and changes us at our core.
Books are powerful precisely because they can accompany real life, maybe even mirror it in a lot of instances, but they will never be able to replace what real-world experiences offer. In other words, a book may plant a seed in our minds or hearts, but lived experience is what offers the weather, soil, and seasons that determine whether anything grows.
Readers with this perspective might even argue that the books they describe as ‘life-changing’ mattered only because they read them while they were experiencing a real-life moment that gave their words consequence and direct meaning to them. The deepest changes in who we are and become usually only emerge through our real-world relationships, failures, responsibilities, losses, risks, work, love, etc. and the unexpected events we cannot control, not necessarily through the books we read.
If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:
A person can understand an idea they read in a book intellectually without understanding what it means emotionally until life gives that idea personal weight.
Books can prepare us for experiences, but that preparation is different from real-world transformation.
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau
The most enduring lessons in our lives often come from consequences we have personally experienced.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” — James Baldwin
A book may inspire us to act, but it is the action and its consequences that ultimately reshape us.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin
Real relationships can challenge our assumptions in ways that solitary reading cannot completely reproduce.
To engage in further dialogue, ask:
Can empathy developed through reading ever be as powerful as empathy developed through lived experience?
Have you ever experienced something in real life that completely changed the meaning of a book you had previously read?
Can a person genuinely change without first having a real-world experience that challenges their existing worldview?
If a book inspires someone to change their behavior, is the transformation caused by the book or by what happens after they read the book?
What experiences have taught you something that no book could have ever taught you?
My Reflection and an Invitation
After sitting with all four responses, I still find myself drawn to the first one: Yes, completely. Not because I think a book can single-handedly remake a person overnight, but because I have experienced the feeling of being changed by something I’ve read on more occasions than I can count. Though I must confess that it is an intuitive conviction more than a conviction I can definitively prove with lines of empirical data… for now. Regardless, I am still convinced there are books that seem to enter our lives at the exact moment we need them, as if by magic— those books that leave us with a different understanding of ourselves, our work, or the world around us… Dare I say, change us?
At the same time, I can see why the other responses complicate that intuitive conviction. It makes sense that we have to be receptive to what a book offers in order to fully receive what it’s offering. And it’s true that we bring our own beliefs and experiences to every book we read, and that our circumstances shape what we are capable of noticing and receiving from a book. I also think there is a level of truth behind the idea that some books function more like mirrors than fundamental agents of personal change, as they help us recognize something we were already sensing but had not yet found the language to express. And there are certainly things that only real-world experience can teach us. Reading about courage is not the same as being courageous when we need to be in real life when it matters, for instance.
Which is probably why the books that stay with us can be so difficult to explain not only to others but to ourselves. Their influence over us is rarely isolated from the rest of our lives or the rest of the world and all its people.
A book can give us an idea, but real-world experience tests it. A story can reveal something we didn’t know we were carrying within us all along. A single sentence can mean something different on different days in our lives because of the different experiences we have at different ages, and can even help us recognize or face something difficult a few years after reading it. Fiction and nonfiction can both be change-makers as well, as the form a book takes seems to matter less than the experience a person has when and after reading it. And on and on…
So while I intuitively believe in the fundamental power of books to change us, I still see all the other responses outlined above as valid and worthy of reflection and consideration and might end up including a bit of all the responses in my extended notes on this question when our dialogue comes to a close at the end of the week.
I want to hear from you.
What book changed something for you, or even changed you?
What was happening in your life when you read it, and do you think the book changed you, revealed something that was already there, or gave you the perspective you needed to make a change yourself?
Join the Dialoguers Chat to share your responses to today’s question.
I would especially love to hear about the books that had an impact on you and your life that are difficult to explain— those books that arrived at an oddly serendipitous moment or became meaningful only years after you first read them, for example.
You don’t have to defend one of the four answers above if you join the chat either, by the way. Just tell us your thoughts on the books that have changed you in some way or tell us what makes you uncertain about whether books can genuinely change us or not. There are no strict ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers here, just those authentic responses that will help us explore what books have changed us and maybe allow us to get a little closer to how and why.
That feels like the more interesting conversation to me anyway, since we probably all agree that books matter, but we may have different ideas about how they matter to us as individuals, which is where a meaningful dialogue can begin.
Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry
This week’s Posts: The Books That Changed Us
Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us
ICYM August’s Theme, The Creative Life
Go more in depth with The Creative Life Writing Collection
September’s The Stories We Carry Writing Collection is coming soon!
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