A few years ago I came across an article by the science fiction author Nicola Griffith, in which she wrote about the responses she had had from her readers. Her books, it turned out, had changed people's lives, helping them to accept their own identity and situation:

Shortly thereafter, an author I know told me of a reader who had contacted him to say that his novel had given him the courage to go on with his life when everything was black. About this time I also discovered David Shield's intriguingly titled memoir, How Literature Saved My Life. The serendipitous confluence of these events impressed themselves upon me. I myself had previously experienced the transformative power of the written word: in my late teens I felt ‘like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken’ as I discovered the hitherto hidden continent of poetry. Later on, as a literary scholar I would come to feel that there was something missing from, or taken for granted in, literary studies: the question of literature's importance and meaning in our troubled lives. It was as if the wonder and deep engagements with literary works was deemed self-explanatory or, even, an affective fallacy, something to be set aside in order to move onto the ‘important’ stuff: explication, judgement, criticism.

However, many avid readers find sustenance and meaning in literature, which is why we are drawn to it in the first place.