Each fiction contaminates the imaginary purity of everyday life by denying the privileged authority of immediate, lived context and that context's subsequent "authenticity" of experience.
Because fiction "occurs" in a world simultaneous to and "outside" everyday life, it interrupts the narrativity, the linearity of that life. The weaving of fictive genres throughout this linearity lends to everyday life a lyric quality, a quality of recurrence and variation upon theme.
-Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
