“Fiction allows your dreams to come true.” That’s what James McBride ’79 told PBS News Hour during a conversation about his award-winning 2023 novel “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.” McBride means this quite literally: The character Chona—who works in the book’s grocery store—was inspired by his grandmother, an immigrant from Poland whom he never met. She “wasn’t in a marriage where there was love,” McBride told the Washington Post. However, he spoke with his mother and many of the people who knew his grandmother in real life—so he could imagine a different, happier ending for her. “I wanted my grandmother to…have a wonderful life,” McBride told PBS. “I wanted her to be loved. So I wrote a book in which she was loved, and I made her loved.” In “The Radical Truth of Fiction,” episode 3 of our Running to the Noise podcast, McBride and President @cambar1 talk about how love powers “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store”—and so much more. Listen at the link in bio. Photo: Chia Messina...