Useful Fictions

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion observed in The White Album . Why is this? Michael Austin asks, in Useful Fictions . Why, in particular, are human beings, whose very survival depends on obtaining true information, so drawn to fictional narratives? After all, virtually every human culture reveres some form of storytelling. Might there be an evolutionary reason behind our species’ need for stories? Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, narrative theory, cogn