Once, while driving home from New York, the writer and I found ourselves trapped in a car with people we barely knew. It was late. To fill an awkward silence, the woman sitting in the front passenger seat began telling us about her grandmother. The topic seemed to just bubble up without antecedent. The writer listened intently, while I deliberated about what I was going to eat when I got home.

In what would amount to roughly three written paragraphs she summed an entire life. She said all the “right things”—all the things one is expected to say about a departed relative. The writer was struck by how sad that seemed. It was obvious this was a woman she loved deeply and mournfully missed. But she’d managed to strip away all the blood and bone of her. Eighty years of hopes, worries, triumphs, regrets, lust and heartache… gone. All replaced by the platitudes of the dead.

The writer didn’t know how many times she’d told this story—nor how many versions there were. But was sure at some point the story would bear no resemblance to the woman it was meant to honor. He imagined there would eventually be great grandchildren who’d wonder about the woman whose words were gilded with rose petals, who once danced with Czar Nicholas at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and who never took a shit.

“For a story to endure, it must be loved for just what it is.”

Quantum physicists say we reify the world by observing it. It’s the same with stories. Through observation black letters on white paper form a language. The language develops a pulse and begins to breathe. Characters animate. Events transpire. Time moves forward.

Stories are a life-form. Readers make them real by reading them. But stories are fragile. They’re subject to redaction, revision, truncation, and misinterpretation. For a story to endure it must be genuine, and it must be loved for just what it is.