How can fiction lead us to truth?

I know some people don’t read “fiction” because they believe it “isn’t true” so it isn’t worth reading. But is it really “not true”? Can we gain truth from reading it? Truth about the author, truth about ourselves, truth about others?

The Australian author David Malouf believes that what we experience through our imagination is every bit as real was what we experience directly in the every day. He believes that “the whole point of storytelling or drama may be just this: that by experiencing things in imagination, in apprehending and exploring them that way, we can save ourselves from having to live them out as fact.”

Do you agree with this? Or you do think that fiction is purely a mechanism for escape from the real world with no real standing in our every day lives?

Would you rather have your child learn about morals from a story book, learning to empathise with characters, or would you rather them having to experience a situation without that prior knowledge and have to figure it out then?

How can fiction lead us to truth?