I watched Netflix’s new adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and found myself uncomfortably entangled — not with the show itself so much as with my response to it. The series is ambitious and beautifully shot, if a bit thin, and its creator clearly knows the territory of youth, violence and masculinity. What unsettled me was how, out of that crowded ensemble, the only character I could truly care about was Piggy — the bespectacled, brainy, bullied boy who keeps worrying about order, water and fire safety. In both the novel and the series he’s the avatar of reason and civilization. I recognized myself in him, and that recognition felt both inevitable and worrying.
Seeing oneself in a character isn’t a surprise. As a queer person and a member of groups long excluded from stories, I value representation. When people who look like you, love like you, or struggle like you finally get to tell their own stories, it widens the canon and helps everyone see a fuller world. That progress matters deeply.
But there’s another pattern I’ve noticed over years of teaching writing to high school and college students: a reflexive belief that a piece of literature only matters if it mirrors your exact experience. Students — and, later, adults I talk to — often measure a book, a film, or a show by how directly it reproduces the granular details of their lives. Call it literary narcissism. It’s understandable; we’ve long encouraged young readers to take fiction personally by giving them protagonists their age and similar circumstances. I used to assign stories with teenage narrators so students would see writing as a conversation they could join, not an artifact locked away in a dusty shelf. I’m not innocent in creating this habit.
The trouble is that when the default expectation becomes “I must see myself here,” readers can close themselves off to works that weren’t written about them or by people like them. They risk missing the other thing art can do: not only reflect but also open a window or a door into lives, ideas and modes of feeling that extend beyond the self. That expansion — the ability to reach across difference and find the human common ground — is a central, terrifyingly generous aim of art.
I was scribbling notes about all this for an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour (I didn’t end up saying these things on air), and later that day an Instagram clip dropped into my feed: a 2008 conversation in which Fran Lebowitz told Toni Morrison that people have been taught to look for themselves in books — to treat a book as a mirror instead of a door or a window. “A way out,” she said. It landed exactly where it should. I loved the line, and I also loved how quickly an algorithm decided I needed to see it.
There’s no contradiction between wanting better representation and wanting readers to be willing to step outside themselves. Representation corrects historic absences; the willingness to be moved by someone else’s story enlarges empathy. If we only consume art that confirms what we already know, we shrink our capacity to be surprised, unsettled or transformed.
So when you find yourself clinging to the pleasures of recognition — and please do savor them — try to save some of your attention for the works that don’t immediately reflect you. Read toward discomfort. Watch to learn a perspective you don’t inhabit. Let a book or a film be, as Lebowitz suggested, a way out as well as a mirror. You’ll keep what representation gives you and also reclaim the broader power of art: to reach beyond our familiar selves and show us, sometimes painfully and sometimes beautifully, that we are both more particular and more connected than we thought.