Of course, there’s no way to pierce the heart and mind of a reader except with a razor sharp slice of the singular. Maybe fiction and identity politics have this in common. We can only achieve kinesthetic, flesh-and-blood understanding with palpable, enumerated specificity.

How does a writer who’d started a novel involving gender and identity politics more than a decade ago incorporate the new transparency in social progress as outspoken figureheads like Caitlyn Jenner move to the forefront of cultural consciousness? Over at Lit Hub, Rachel Basch reflects on how witnessing social progress in real time affects her processing of the truths in her fiction.