The Healing Power of Fiction: How Cozy Mysteries Helped Me Cope With Trauma

It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

It’s been three years since I was discharged from my month-long hospital stay. That month in the hospital was grueling, filled with the pain and exhaustion of a severe ulcerative colitis flare coupled with a C. diff infection. By the time of discharge, I had wasted away to almost nothing—I’d lost 34 of my original 122 pounds and was only barely able to walk a few steps. My road to recovery would take years.

I was overjoyed to come home. And in the hospital I had discovered new tools that I knew would help me in my healing. Some tools were practices like deep breathing, affirmations, and meditation, all of which made sense—I’d read about the healing effects of such practices long before getting sick myself.

But another tool had surprised me, because I’d never considered it a method for healing. I’d been drawn to it all on my own, and yet I’d found it most essential of all.

It was fiction.

For much of my crisis, I had found myself unable to meditate or be mindful. Those practices only began to work late in my hospitalization, after the worst of my ordeal had passed and my physical healing had already begun. Before that time, during most of my crisis, whenever I tried to “be present in the moment,” a raw terror opened up in me that threatened to throw my whole delicate body into panic.

I was wasting away, constantly in pain, and in danger of dying. I couldn’t handle the present moment—I needed escape. And fiction took me out of myself.

Life in the hospital is surprisingly busy, with nurses and specialists coming in and out of your room throughout the day. Even when alone, I was still often busy—with hourly trips to the toilet, crushing fatigue, or pain that left me gasping. But in between all that, I disappeared into fiction.

I watched “Parenthood” on my little Android, propping the device against books or food dishes on my hospital tray. And in the wee hours of the morning, when my meds kept me wide awake, I immersed myself in cozy mysteries by the light of my headlamp. I read more fiction in the hospital than I had read in many years.

My husband Ron and I didn’t even own fiction books. The mysteries I was reading were provided by my mother, who has a whole shelf full of them at her house. She is a learned woman who reads challenging books on history and philosophy, the kind of books I also liked—at the time of my crisis, I preferred books I would “learn from,” meaning books I’d learn facts from. I hadn’t yet come to appreciate that there are other kinds of learning that are equally valuable.

But Mom, unlike me, also read novels. When I found myself too loopy for facts and asked to borrow a novel instead, she brought me a whole pile. 

And so it was that in the midst of my crisis, my disdain for fiction quickly evaporated. I devoured Mom’s books. In my hours alone at night, I read book after book from Louise Penny’s mystery series, which takes place in the fictional Quebec village of Three Pines.

Chief Inspector Gamache, our hero, is aging and experienced and extraordinarily kind. Three Pines is populated with a tightknit community of quirky, artsy residents who help Gamache solve the town’s many murders, which seem to happen on a perplexingly regular basis for such a pleasant little town. The books are rich with descriptions of Quebec’s dramatic four seasons and delicious food—everyone eats sumptuous meals all the time and never seems to gain any weight. Despite having had to follow restricted diets for years since my colitis diagnosis, for some reason I didn’t mind reading about all their baguettes and brie and delicious stews and mouth-watering pastries.

Alone in the middle of the night, after my latest trip to the bathroom, ramped up on IV steroids, I would snuggle into bed with my headlamp and smile to myself, excited to return to Three Pines. My midnight hours of reading became my favorite time in the hospital.

There were other books that comforted me, too. Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper. Joe Coomer’s Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God. Later, Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police series.

I didn’t learn many facts from these books. But they all gave me things no nonfiction book could have given me: escape and comfort. 

During my worst bouts with pain, I found two remedies that seemed to me to be equally essential: opioids and Harry Potter.

The opioids were, of course, crucial. A few times, when the pain escalated beyond my threshold of sanity, I needed morphine, fentanyl, or dilaudid to control it. Most of the time, I was constantly on Norco, which is oxycodone.

Fearing addiction and complications with my colitis, which can be negatively affected by narcotics, I tried to limit my intake of all these drugs. That meant that even with them at my fingertips, I was often sweating and straining my way through pain instead of asking for them. In the afternoons, which were always my most tortuous times, Ron would read the Harry Potter books aloud to me, and the books lessened my pain. Besides the drugs, those books were all I ever wanted for pain.

I had read the whole series aloud to Ron years earlier, breaking my usual pattern of reading only nonfiction. Now I wanted nothing more than to disappear into the world of Hogwarts and magic, and so for hours, Ron would read aloud by my bedside while I clutched heat packs to my belly, breathing and sweating. Transported into the stories, I could physically feel both my mind and my belly unclenching. My breathing became more regular, the pain less intense. Harry Potter took the edge off.

I am awed now, and humbled, to realize what a critical role all these stories played in my healing.

In the hospital, I felt vaguely guilty about all my escaping. Shouldn’t I be meditating, or breathing deeply, or practicing mindfulness? But the reality was that I couldn’t do those things. Not until later, when the worst of my pain and fear had subsided.

I had thought my escaping signaled some failure, some weakness of character, but later I came to understand that it really signaled my own innate wisdom. I was listening to my deepest instinct, which told me that now was not the time to meditate. Disappearing into stories was more healing for me. Although no one had told me this was true, I discovered it through my own experience.

Now I understand that, although mindfulness can also be very helpful, stories are a perfectly respectable way to get through a trauma. Sometimes, they may be the only way to get through.

Over the past three years, I’ve continued to read plenty of fiction. I finally understand why Mom reads it alongside her more serious books.

Fiction relaxes the mind. Something in me was tighter before my health crisis—more rigid and narrow, more left-brained. My focus on only facts and hard knowledge meant less personal connection to others and their stories, to humanity, and to myself. Escaping into stories, I can sometimes even physically feel my brain relax. This has to be a good thing.

Plus, reading fiction is just so much fun!

I am endlessly grateful to J.K. Rowling, Louise Penny, the writers of movies and television dramas, and other authors of fiction. Their stories are more than entertainment—they are a healing gift to the world.