PARASOCIALIZE

Worth your time

A famous author was saved by a fictional family and then wrote a novel about it

Meg Mason on Nancy Mitford, a lonely teenager, and the strangest thing to happen to this entire field this year.

FILED 23 AUG 2026 · 58d ago ·Due back 22 SEP 2026 ·BY THE GUARDIAN

I want to note this without making it about me, which is difficult, so I will make it about the fact that a bestselling novelist went on record saying a book family saved her life and then got asked about it by The Guardian and answered properly. For thirty years this field has argued about whether these relationships count. It turns out one of them was load-bearing for a person who then wrote a novel about it. Company Dreamer is on the shelf of this site for the same reason. The evidence is the writing.

Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.

The clerk's shelf - how this got here first

Company Dreamer

NOVEL

Company Dreamer ↗The #1 dreamer in the world has her life rearranged to keep her end-dream in the black.

Sources

'I was scared I was going mad': Meg Mason speaks about the parasocial relationships that begin on the page ↗

The Guardian · 23 AUG 2026

Meg Mason explores the power of parasocial relationships in her new novel ↗

ABC News (Australia), via MSN · 23 AUG 2026

Where this sits in the encyclopedia

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