Something interesting happens when I read books by authors with whom I don't have very much in common. I go into the book expecting to be confronted by difference, and instead I find the author's experiences to be surprisingly relatable. Likewise, reading authors with whom I have a lot of things in common always reveals many things that we don't share.

These instances of relation and distance are illuminating. They can reveal the true political reasons for such characteristics, rather than the pat identity-essentialist logic that modern society would prefer us to follow. If I read a James Baldwin essay that rings true as a bell for me, and Baldwin in turn found his unexpected mirror in Dostoevsky—well, what is the common thread between all of us? What conditions and commitments do we three share that created such literary solidarity? This is where politics, history, social documentation must be brought in, to find out what forces are creating this psychological kinship.

For better or for worse, today most of us read books as representations of particular categories of person, and these categories have been assigned lots of weight. Expectations abound for how fitting into one category or another will cause a particular psychological landscape to bloom. But when you read from a variety of authorial backgrounds and perspectives, you discover similarities and differences that give the lie to these categories. The received wisdom about how being a particular type of person is supposed to shape you falls away. All that you are left with are the resonances, the dissonances, and the task of figuring out how to account for them. And that to me is a much more worthwhile way of thinking about human existence and literature.