Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and I'm here with Jennifer Lynn Barnes, author of the wildly popular Inheritance Game series.

About 4 million copies sold, 80 weeks on the bestseller list. And we're going to talk about those books.

And the fifth book in the series,

Games Untold, is coming out. I believe next week, you can definitely order it now. But I am most excited

to talk about the psychology of fiction because Jennifer was also a professor of psychology

and incorporated what she learned into her books.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

You know, ever since I left academia, I welcome any excuse to talk about the science of fiction.

Yeah.

As a former biologist, when I learned that people actually run studies on why we

engage with fiction, I was just captivated. And, you know, there's so much to talk about. I think

maybe a good place to start is why? Why do we cry? When we read about characters,

we know aren't even real? You know, that's a great question. And in the psychology of fiction,

it's kind of the million dollar question. Like, why do people spend so much time and so much

money and so much emotion on things we know quite well are make believe.

There are a lot of different theories about it.

Many of the ones that are specifically about the emotion fiction makes us feel

relies on the fact that if you think about the environment in which our brains evolved,

there was no reason for us to need to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Like, think about something like a television show, right?

Like, if you see someone's face in front of you, your brain is largely going to interpret that as there's

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