Nicole Polizzi

I got bullied in high school. A lot of girls were so mean to me because their boyfriends wanted to hang out with me and my girls, so they pretty much bullied me to the point where I was crying at night.

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.