Maggie is only made up but she helps her readers see something, change something. In 2001, Joan Didion defended her friend Elizabeth Hardwick’s book of essays about women writers and women characters, Seduction and Betrayal, from the New York Times reviewer’s objection that Hardwick had muddled up real and imaginary women. “That the women we invent have changed the course of our lives as surely as the women we are,” Didion snapped back in her introduction to the essay collection, “is in many ways the point of this passionate book.” This isn’t just a psychoanalytic point, but also a practical one. Women’s lives in particular have been curtailed by law, by custom, by inhibition too, and it takes the effort of imagining another sort of life before anyone can believe in it and live it. It is almost a political point: it was said that slavery was natural, even though it was clearly unjust, until it changed. It is said now that addressing the climate crisis is too costly, in all the different ways costs are calculated. It feels to me that the groundwork for those bigger shifts happens in tinier ways, in the attempt to imagine, say, a girl who acts according to her own feelings, even if she risks being misunderstood by those who love her.