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Introduction
Conclusion
Reality
Abstraction
Reflection
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Appendix

          We may dislike or even hate Walt, but we are not driven through to the end of his story out of hate, but by an invested interest in how his story ends. This connection does not go away, even as Walt sinks deeper and deeper into evil, leaving us with the task of jumping through some psychological hoops in order to justify our empathy for him.     

 

          This phenomenon of having empathy towards morally questionable figures is not exclusive to Breaking Bad, either. Walter White is an easy example to understand the phenomenon - it is the whole point of the show, in his case - but characters like him permeate all manner of fictions. In some ways Walter is not even the best example of this. He is mostly empathetic by the pity of his circumstances and by how closely the show allows us to get to him, but we don’t get the sense that the show wants us to like him. Other characters like Omar Little of The Wire simply have high likability, altogether lacking whatever good intentions Walter may at least have had in the beginning. It isn’t exclusive to extreme criminal figures, either, as characters like Roger Sterling of Mad Men are fairly ordinary, but it still takes the distance of fiction for us to look past his heinous adultery and racism. The list of categories and characters to fit into them is endless when we start really digging into the fictional canon, and there is no denying the appeal of a flawed but empathetic character. Their flaws often make them more empathetic rather than admirable, which actually makes them more appealing and identifiable than an idealized heroic figure.     

 

          If we are to view the collective canon of fiction as reflective of something deeper about the human condition – as we should – then this trend of empathy may have larger implications towards our ability to empathize than a single character like Walt would otherwise reveal. If we are capable of damning a real-world equivalent to Walt, yet stick to our screens as Walt continues to commit more and more ludicrous offenses, is it really just that the abstraction of fiction allows us to ignore our ethical logistics, or is there something more that we are afraid to talk about?

Abstraction

        The show Game of Thrones has plenty of characters who could fit into this phenomenon, but none make the viewer have quite as big of a change of heart over them as Jaime Lannister. Starting as a cocky, incestuous, child-pushing antagonist to the obvious hero Ned Stark, we eventually come to see Jaime as a man tormented by the impossibility of his circumstances, forced to make choices where all outcomes leave him worse off. His outlook in the early series is tainted by the unforgiving perception of the world that has seemingly punished him for doing the right thing – specifically killing the Mad King as opposed to letting him destroy an entire city’s worth of people.

 

            As events in the story unfold, Jaime eventually shifts into the position of protagonist, and at present is one of the more easily empathetic characters on the show. Of course, like with Walt, we are letting Jaime off the hook for a lot of wrongs when we decide that we empathize with him. This might be impossible if not for the abstraction of Jaime’s situation, a prime example of the effect fiction can have on how we perceive the experience of characters.

          The degree of what a character may get away with and still get our empathy can often be determined by how their actions are obscured through abstraction. A character like Jaime is about as far from reality as a character can get while still being human, existing in a fantasy world dominated by fantastical elements. Jaime’s actions in this setting may have equivalencies to reality, but their connotation is made abstract by the deep fiction of the story itself, as well as the overall dark tone of the series where cousin-murder and threatening infanticide is normalized. This has the effect of dulling the significance of his sins, as they often feel right at home in the violent world of Game of Thrones, which makes Jaime’s more admirable characteristics actually stand out. Jaime then can be seen as a model for how we empathize with many characters: through their relative decency in an otherwise dark setting. Jaime stands out as a notably likable figure in Game of Thrones, but without the vast array of unsympathetic characters around making him look good – Tywin, Cersei, the Boltons, the Freys, and too many more to count – we would not be so quick to feel for him.     

 

          Before we jump to conclusions about how a less-fantastical version of Game of Thrones would paint Jaime as a total monster, let’s remember our first example. Walt is guilty of sins at least as severe as Jaime and he doesn’t have the luxury of living in Westeros. However, to a degree, the world of Breaking Bad is made fantastical due to the ludicrousness of its story and characters. Walt begins as a run of the mill teacher but ascends through a series of absurdist scenarios to be this larger-than-life figure, alongside similar characters like drug lord Gus Fring and corrupt lawyer Saul Goodman. While it takes place in the real world, it is hard to call Breaking Bad realistic fiction due to the nature of its story and characters, therefore creating the same sort of abstraction that makes empathy possible in Jaime’s case.       

 

        Perhaps one of the best example of realistic fiction that doubles-down on realism is The Wire, yet the character that most resonates with fans and has attained a legendary status in the canon of fictional characters is Omar Little. Omar sees himself as the Robin Hood of Baltimore, sticking up drug dealers as a day job. He walks the streets wearing a duster and a bullet-proof vest, toting a shotgun and whistling “a hunting we will go” as the dealers on the corners run for their lives. This all draws up Omar to be a larger-than-life character, made all the more impactful by the otherwise tamed realism of everything else in the show. This grants a mysticism to his character that draws the audience into caring for him. Omar has his flaws like any of these characters – we don’t get too much evidence of the “give back to the poor” part of the Robin Hood analogy, and he still profits off the drug trade despite his seeming subversion from it – but in a show with as massive and diverse of a cast as The Wire, it is telling of how we read and react to fiction that the character most clearly exaggerated is the easiest to root for.  

 

          Aside from his role as a fantastical element in an otherwise realistic story, Omar is a perfect model for the type of character in fiction who is valorized for doing things that would be seen as criminal in reality. His over-the-top stick-ups and surreal ability to survive insane situations make him an exciting and entertaining character for audiences to grasp onto, a character they can cheer for. A less dramatic version of this model could be Roger Sterling, who speaks and acts offensively regularly yet remains an empathetic and charming character, and is in fact celebrated for his sassy sense of humor and blatant disregard for decency. Despite their flaws, both Omar and Roger remain likable characters, and are often considered fan favorites. The extent to which they are both portrayed in abstract fictional settings allows us to more easily forgive these flaws, but any real life equivalent to either character would be problematic.   

 

          Part of what makes such characters empathetic is also the degree to which we are allowed to know them. Jaime becomes empathetic to us as his side of the story is made more clear and we develop a better understanding of why he does what he does. We feel that we know Jaime on a closer level than we might get to know someone who we have real interactions with. Fiction creates a veil through which we can project and – to a degree – pretend to know a character. To apply it to a character more prone to discussion, the same thing could be said of Jay Gatsby, more so even, since his story is not told from his perspective, leaving his motivations and characteristics all the more obscured and open to interpretation. Our freedom to analyze and project onto Gatsby is what makes him such a popular and discussable figure, and these discussions only have any authenticity because Gatsby is fictional. Fiction gives us the feeling of authority in understanding a character, versus in reality where we more often acknowledge that our understanding of a person is limited.     

 

          This sense of authority in judging a character reaches questionable levels of authenticity with characters like Walt, who we get to know so closely over the course of several seasons worth of TV that we are in danger of over-identifying with him. Despite its fantastical nature, a lot of reality gets applied to Breaking Bad and to Walt’s character, but how realistic is Walt, truly? Is Walt’s character more real than a villain who we do not empathize with, like Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men? Both are portrayed as larger-than-life figures, yet we do not empathize with Anton as we do Walt. While it could be argued that Anton is an objectively worse person, their actions are not too different from each other when we look at their stories objectively. So if we can so clearly see Anton for what he is, does this not suggest that we are giving Walter too much credit? The authenticity of relating to a character that fiction allows shows signs of danger in Walt’s case, as by the end of the series we all know we should hate Walt, but the part of him that we still identify with from the early seasons, the part that is clearly gone by the time Heisenberg has taken full form, keeps its hold on us, warping our otherwise clear sense of what we can and cannot look past on Walt’s list of evils.

         This sense of understanding we develop for Burr makes the remorse he shows after killing Hamilton truly affecting. How often, in reality, are we going to look at a situation like Burr and Hamilton’s and grant either of them the empathy that we do. The duel is an impulsive, foolish move that only followed through due to excess pride on both sides, which is a poor excuse for someone to lose their life. There’s just something to knowing Burr with the intimacy that we do that makes us understanding enough of his life to know how genuine his guilt is.     

 

          Just how we can genuinely know Burr is what makes this example a perfect showcase of how fiction is able to cultivate empathy for characters rather than people. We did not instinctually view Burr as a three dimensional person when he was just a few lines in our history books, not before he was presented how he was in Hamilton, where his motivations are laid bare, where he is no longer tied to reality and we as an audience can truly connect ourselves to him. Burr is not a fictional character, but he has only grown to be an empathetic figure in our eyes by virtue of his fictionalization. It highlights a lapse in logic that we are better able to understand and treat a fictional character like a real, complex person, while the real person has historically been made two dimensional and denied an honest layer of complexity. We have come to viewing analytical interpretations of people and their actions as a matter of fiction rather than reality.     

 

      Perhaps the reason for this is the same reason that most inaccuracies, stereotypes, and misconceptions are formed: acknowledging the complete truth is too messy, and it becomes harder to come to a sound conclusion on how we must respond to reprehensible actions. When simplified, we can pass judgement more effectively as there is less that need be considered and proportioned. In the inconsequential world of fiction, we are allowed this luxury, allowed to ponder greater moral questions and deduce a character’s moral standing, because in the end we do not actually have to respond to anything that character may have done. In reality, however, we cannot always afford such complexity, not if we want to see action taken with immediacy.     

 

          A relevant example of this in reality is comedian Louis C.K., whose respected status evaporated after multiple instances of him sexually harassing women came to light. The public reaction was practically unanimous, and C.K. was essentially banished from his legacy, losing his deal with longtime venue FX as well as the cancelation of a film that was set to release just days before the scandal broke the mainstream media. There’s no arguing that C.K. lost the right to his status and respectability, but there is a lot of discussion being missed by just labeling him as a monster and leaving it at that.

 

        If we attempt to look at C.K. with the same dimensions that we would a fictional character, then we may come to view C.K. in less monstrous, more empathetic way. We may do this, but unlike with fictional characters, the consequences of C.K.’s actions are real, and the need for such actions to have a response is considered more important than giving the perpetrator of such offenses the benefit of the doubt. Even if we see the potential for empathy in Louis’ situation, our reasons for doing so are inherently problematic. Perhaps we feel for Louis because, like Jaime, his flaws are small potatoes compared to the crimes of others. However, we cannot let Louis off the hook simply because what he has done is not as severe as what has been done by others, as it would be making actions okay just out of virtue of their relativity when they are objectively harmful – and of course, even speaking relatively, Louis’ actions are pretty jarring. Perhaps we feel for Louis because, like Walt, we feel we know him so well that we fail to realize the severity of his actions. Louis has historically made a character out of himself in his own shows and films, so it is no stretch to apply our feelings for his fictionalized self to his real self, which makes us naturally more inclined to identify and empathize with him. Of course, like with Walt, we must be cautious about over-identifying with a figure, absorbing inauthentic material and granting them too much realism, as we risk once again ignoring the severity of Louis’ actions as we often did with Walt. Or perhaps we feel for Louis because, like Omar, we just like him. We admire his work and his personality and do not want to see it all come crashing down. This is the most obviously dangerous route, as if we allow actions to go excused just out of admiration for the perpetrator, we are again ignoring the reality of his actions. 

 

          Even if there is some truth to any of these perspectives, there’s no way to take it without severely undermining the experiences of C.K.’s victims, so it becomes a question of comparing evils: do we acknowledge the experience of these women and make strides toward the systematic improvement in how our society treats women, or do we be a little less harsh with how we talk about a single man, who still definitely sexually harassed multiple women and abused his power. There’s just no debating it – even if there is the possibility of empathy for C.K. in the same way that we emphasize with fictional characters, the reality of the situation carries inherent moral consequence to even consider.

 Empathy and Fiction 

 “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand." 
 -Pablo Picasso 

Conclusion

      In this light, we can see that fiction has quietly become the means by which we test the waters of reality, where we can throw the darkest aspects of the human experience into the light and examine it like an animal in a zoo, behind a protective barrier so that what we see may not harm us. We can observe without having to pass judgement, which allows us to see truths that otherwise would go unnoticed. Characters of similar or equivalent moral standing may inhabit reality, but due to our need for judgement and action, we hold them to a far less empathetic standard.     

 

          Realizing this, is the status quo a good thing, or should we be approaching our observation of real people at the same level as we do fictional characters? It seems odd to suggest that having less empathy is the better alternative, but that is the current state of things. We are refusing to offer understanding for these characters because we have an ethical standard for what is and is not acceptable in society, and we have come to see empathizing with these characters not as a means of understanding and improving, but as a danger that could shift our moral standards and normalize inappropriate behavior. So instead of trying to empathize and learn from men like C.K., we diminish them to monsters in order to assert their behavior as unacceptable, as we fear that showing any level of empathy may leave the door open for further misdeeds to be done.

          Is this truly the case, or merely an anxiety of our society? Are we best to draw a hard line of empathy and neutralize any who cross it? Is such severity necessary? Whatever the answer may be, fiction shows us something that cannot be denied: somewhere deep within us, even if we may never admit or acknowledge it, even if it may be a source of shame should it ever surface, we empathize with these people. What we do with that fact is what we must reconcile with.

       How many viewers tuned in to see Walter White’s final chapter when Breaking Bad came to its end? Millions of avid fans followed the journey of the chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin from beginning to end, and many more have since discovered the series based on recommendations and the general critical consensus that Breaking Bad is a television masterpiece. While it is difficult to refute that claim, it is one with some surprising implications when we seriously considers Walter White’s story.

 

          When we think about what makes the ideal protagonist in the fiction we consume, we are often going to think about characters we like, those who we relate to and see a lot of ourselves in. The sense of empathy we have towards their situations is what makes their stories compelling. Knowing this, it is a wonder that a character like Walter White garnered as much attention as he did. His transition into vicious murder and heartless schemes is horrifying, and when all of his misdeeds are added up it is amazing how so many viewers became so attached to him and his story. 

               

Introduction

Reality

          Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony winning musical Hamilton received massive critical acclaim, and not only for its twist on hip hop and history, but for the introspective and sensitive way it represented its historical characters. Before hearing Hamilton, who knew anything about Aaron Burr aside from the fact that he lost the presidency to Thomas Jefferson and killed Alexander Hamilton, if even that? Instead of gripping at low-hanging fruit and villainizing Burr, Miranda actually makes great effort to paint Burr as an empathetic character. Even Burr’s role as antagonist within the story is a matter of him being a foil to Hamilton rather than he being of any truly nefarious character, and in the end when Burr realizes that history will only remember him for his darkest hour, we feel for him.

 

          There is something to be said about all this since Hamilton’s murder is not a matter of fiction, but a historical fact – one abstracted to us by its distance in time, but a fact nevertheless. We are capable of empathizing with Burr because we have just spent the last two and half hours with him, listening to him convey his anxieties to us, watching him actively try and surpass them only for those effort to backfire. Sure, he compromises his moral integrity at a number of points, but never to absurd levels, never doing anything we could not conceivably do ourselves. 

Appendix

Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby (2013), courtesy Village Roadshow Pictures, Bazmark Productions, A&E Television, and Red Wagon Entertainment

Omar Little of The Wire (2002-2008), courtesy Blown Deadline Productions and HBO

Roger Sterling of Mad Men (2007-2015), courtesy Weiner Bros., Silvercup Studios, and Lionsgate Television

Glen Topher (Louis C.K.) of I Love You, Daddy (2017), courtesy Pig Newton, Inc. and  Jax Media

Walter White of Breaking Bad (2008-2013), courtesy High Bridge Entertainment, Gran Via Productions, and Sony Pictures Television

Jaime Lannister of Game of Thrones (2011-2017), courtesy Television 360, Grok! Television, Generator Entertainment, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr of Hamilton (2015) - Lin-Manuel Miranda

          When I was first assigned to revisit an old assignment, this is not what I expected I would end up with. In fact, the prospect of basing a whole semester’s worth of work on the piece I ended up choosing sounds absolutely ludicrous to me now. I did not have a lot of pieces that I felt were really worthy of further exploration, and the one I ended up selecting was far from the piece that I was the most proud of. It was the final essay for a class on modernist novels and was a close reading of a passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. The piece was titled From The Cradle to The Grave: Freedom and Identity in The Heat of the Day, was only seven pages long (and typed in a font that would have amounted to even less in Times New Roman), and I only got a B+ on it and honestly felt lucky even to have gotten that. I remember struggling to get through it more than most papers, my argument never feeling cohesive enough to justify any of the points I was making. What it did have going for it was that it was a fairly interesting topic: how does this man, Robert, who is revealed to be a spy for the Germans during WWII, justify his treason? What is the root of his allegiance to fascism?

 

           These questions were interesting to me because Robert’s treason was genuinely surprising. He seemed an empathetic and caring character, while his foil, Harrison, had a personality that seemed more suited for a villainous role. This is, of course, what Bowen intended for us to feel, making Robert’s betrayal both a dramatic shock and a point of significant implication. Moreover, Robert did not seem to change at all after his treason is proved. He remains the empathetic, well-spoken man we cared about beforehand, which seemed a bold move on Bowen’s part. That choice to keep Robert empathetic despite his ties to the Nazis – and his decrying of England’s “freedom” as a farce in favor of the survival-of-the-fittest fascist ideology he outlines in the passage I selected – was interesting to me, and brought me to thinking about how and why we empathize with certain characters who, like Robert, are majorly problematic. While this question did not come to the forefront of the original piece, it was the point that stood out to me looking back, and became the central question that guided my return to the piece.  

 

               When initially visualizing my experiments, I was still thinking small – a full-scale analysis of the book, a research paper on Bowen’s influences, a creative interpretation of Robert’s story, etc. I had not realized the freedom I was being granted to move away from the original piece, and realizing this was a relief, as I was not terribly interested in sticking to Bowen’s book for a whole semester. Instead, I grasped onto this question of empathy and fiction and applied what I saw in Robert to what I have experienced in other works, and with little effort I was able to accumulate a substantial list of other characters and works that exhibited the same phenomenon. The more pieces I viewed with this lens, the more I realized that this phenomenon is essential to all of fiction. This idea became the center point which all of my experiments surrounded, starting with the first, which was simply an extended essay on the idea. At the time of writing, I was still in the process of exploring the space of the topic, and so the experiment had a severe lack of focus. Compared to the final product, this experiment was more concerned with finding the limits of empathy in reality versus fiction, looking at how characters in fiction with sensitive implications to reality were less likely to be empathetic. Robert was the prime example here, being a Nazi character that was still empathetic, and I was interested in if feeling for him had any moral repercussions for us in reality. Questions like this were the dominant part of all the experiments, actually, only being cut out once I decided on my final approach. That would not be for a few experiments yet.

 

                 My second experiment’s content was essentially the same as the first, with a little more focus but still nothing nearing a tangible direction. What was different was the from, which turned the essay into a podcast. This format still appeals to me, as it creates a linearity to the piece and sets the pace at which the listener takes it in, and allows the narrator to use their voice to express complicated feelings and contradictions, which made sections in the first experiment where the correct wording was tricky to get down easier to handle. If I had stuck more to the central questions of the first experiment, I think the podcast would have been a fitting means of delivering the content, but I feel that the changes I eventually made were more conducive to a written format. Also, the extra work that would have gone into making a quality podcast would have taken an already arduous process and pushed it even further – and I would hate to have to listen to so much of my own voice, anyway.

 

                My last experiment was probably the least impactful, since it took a wholly different approach than the first two. It actually was one of the original ideas I had come up with back before I was thinking big enough, which might be a reason it did not turn out as useful as it could have. It is a creative piece, a short story that is heavily inspired by Robert from Bowen’s novel, following a Nazi spy who is found out by his lover and has to explain himself. He expects to be forgiven, but his lover proves unsympathetic and threatens to turn him into the police, leading to the man’s suicide. At least that is what I had in mind, but to speak truthfully, I knew going into this experiment that this was not the approach I would be taking for the final project, so the exact details of the story were not important to me. Still, actually writing a character like the one’s I had been writing about was a good exercise, and did contribute to some of the thought that went into the sections of the final project where I try to decipher why my specific examples were empathetic, as I was attempting to use the same practices in my own story.     

 

                   After the months of work that went into these experiments, it still felt like I was lacking a solid focus. With every question I approached ten more seemed to sprout out. I knew that I would need to choose an angle and settle on it, letting everything else lie dormant in the periphery. The angle to the subject that I found to be the most interesting was comparing how we empathize with fictional characters over real people, and how we must fictionalize real people to an extend in order to empathize with them. It came down to questions of how well we can know a person versus how well we “pretend” to know a fictional character, and how we attribute realistic and complex qualities to fictional characters in order to understand them yet often deny that same complexity to real people. These new central questions came from taking more real life examples that were somewhere between fiction and reality, real people who had been made into characters. These ideas were not necessarily a part of my thought process in the initial experiments, but they stood out to me as both more manageable and possibly more interesting than everything I was going off of with Bowen. So with that, I officially put Bowen to the side and never bothered to pick her back up. I figured that there was more recognizable and relevant work that could better get these newly focused points across than her work, anyway.     

 

                       So with my final approach decided on, I set off. Looking over it all now, I have some mixed feelings. In terms of the project’s direction, I think cutting out the earlier approach was wise, as that would have been a thoroughly more difficult concept to trim down to a sizable length. Another issue that approach always had was a lack of a solid statement, a moment where I discovered something that I considered profound and truly worthy of the whole endeavor of the project. The final approach does have that moment, in my opinion, where it states that “we have come to viewing analytical interpretations of people and their actions as a matter of fiction rather than reality.” It was one of those moments that had not really struck me as the essential point of the piece until after I had written it, only realizing the weight it carried when reading it back later. It grants the whole piece a greater sense of purpose than the previous approaches would have, and changes the project from being a meager list of interesting ideas and into something that may actually be useful. Considering how scattered everything was leading up to it, I am also happy with how concise the conclusion turned out, or really that I have a conclusion at all, since I remember vividly the times when this whole topic was so massive as to have no end in sight.     

 

                    Of course, there is a lot I am not so confident about as well. In particular I worry about the cohesiveness of the Reality section, which starts with the Aaron Burr example and then goes onto the Louis C.K. analysis. While both of these points have to do with how the fictional lens impacts reality, I cannot help but feel that these ideas could be separated into different sections and expanded upon, pulling from more similar examples, like the Abstraction section did to showcase various ways that fiction makes character’s empathetic. The half of the section on C.K. could have particularly benefited from this greater space, as I feel that the ideas are crowded and not always expressed as clearly as I would like them to be, but the current portioning of the sections restricts me from doing more. The sectioning overall is imperfect, and started as a strategy for me to carve a digestible argument out of a jungle of potential. Then again, if I were to take the sections away or even loosen my grip on them enough to allow for more sections, I fear that the topic would get away from me as it did during my experiments. For the scale that this project is meant to be, I believe the current sectioning is the best option, even if it shows its flaws. Despite those flaws – and many more micro-issues that I could tear my hair out over if I really wanted to – I feel a lot better about this project than I expected to when I first started playing around with Wix a few weeks ago, let alone how I felt when I first chose the Bowen piece to return to.     

 

                   This project has certainly been a unique experience, as far as my writing goes. Before this I had really only written seriously for English classes, where there is often an expectation of format that limits exactly what one can say or do with a piece. Here, while still working with fiction in an analytical way, I was not restricted by the need to quote directly from the texts or to substantiate every individual claim I made on a piece. Even though the material is technically still subjective, it felt like I was working with the facts of a piece rather than the abstract, discussing how we collectively feel about characters rather than how the author might have intended, which always requires a tedious amount of qualification that weighs down otherwise interesting ideas. There is also a satisfaction in using fictional analysis to actually say something substantial that applies to realms greater than the piece itself, which is almost never the case when all you are doing is a close reading of a passage. That increased sense of purpose and scope was intimidating to me, and I think it was a big part of why I struggled to get a grip on what specifically I wanted to write about for so long. It is one thing to think on the scale that the project demanded, but the real challenge for me was being able to reel it back down to a tangible project, something to show for all the thought that had gone into it.

 

                 I could look back over the semester and imagine what I could have done better and bum myself out, or I could look at what I have done despite the challenges I faced and see it as indicative of my growth as a writer. For now, I will choose the latter.

Reflection Narrative

About the Author

Henry Milek is a current Junior at the University of Michigan, studying English with minors in Writing and Digital Studies. If it is not clear already, he enjoys watching tv and movies, reading books, and playing video games. When he is not doing any of these things, he keeps busy thinking way too hard about all of it. After college, Henry hopes to pursue a career in publishing, and may eventually give law school a try (maybe). Whatever happens, Henry is confident that writing will be a part of it.

About the Author
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