At the centre is Sophie, a woman surrounded by colleagues, friends and family who nevertheless feels increasingly detached from the life around her. Into that absence comes an author she admires from afar, creating a relationship that exists almost entirely inside Sophie’s imagination. Mason is fascinated by that phenomenon, but she resists treating parasocial attachment as inherently unhealthy. For readers, she argues, imagining intimacy with writers can be an extension of the same imaginative instinct that makes fiction possible in the first place.
