Every reader reading is a self-deceiver: We simultaneously “believe” a story and know that it is a fabrication. Our belief in the reality of the story may be so strong that it produces physical reactions—tears, trembling, sighs, gasps, a headache. At the same time, as long as the fiction is working for us, we know that our submission is voluntary, that we have, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out, suspended disbelief.

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edit…, loc. 583