Today, a top-secret tip: “fiction” means that authors make things up. Wait—maybe you knew that. Why is it, then, that we strive so hard to root our stories in the real world, when we’ve already accepted that the quicker and more meaningful road to truth can often be found through a concoction? Perhaps, after hearing the word at a writing conference, we’re hung up on the importance of “verisimilitude”—keeping it real. And perhaps we’re misinterpreting the meaning of verisimilitude. Achieving verisimilitude does not mean that every single plot point can be reproduced in the laboratory of real life. It means that our stories must seem to be true. I’ve been thinking about this while reading Stephanie Kallos’s Broken For You, a contemporary novel that pays homage to all that is broken. Seventy-something protagonist Margaret Hughes is broken by grief for her lost son and, upon learning of a brain tumor, the vague sense that she may not have done enough in her life. She takes in a you...