Meanwhile I was scanning a large bookcase in the living room. How about this, I said, pulling a heavy book from the bottom shelf: The World’s Best Folk and Fairy Tales.

Gods and heroes, princes and peasants, giants and little people, witches, tricksters, and animals, animals, animals.

This would be our reading from now on. She could not get enough of it. Now I was the one who almost lost her voice.

Much has been said about mystery stories being like fairy tales—and popular for some of the same reasons. Instead of ogres, serial killers. And though they might not be pure of heart—no princes, or Galahads, or saints—the detectives are still heroes, righteous if not always noble avengers. All is simplified. Characters: types. Moral code: clear. Where guilt or innocence lie: plain. Plenty of cruelty, violence, and gore, but in the end the evil are vanquished, and even if the good don’t live happily ever after there is closure, the kind of closure that mostly eludes people in real life.

Except that fairy tales are beautiful, my friend said. Fairy tales are sublime, and mysteries are not.

Another difference: unlike mysteries, fairy tales are not escapist. Even if they too simplify and conform to familiar formulas, the truths in fairy tales always run deep. That is why children love them. (Who knows better than a child what it’s like to be at the mercy of hidden and arbitrary forces, and that anything can happen, no matter how strange, either for good or for ill.) Fairy tales are real. They are more mysterious than any mystery novel. That is why, unlike mystery novels—meant to entertain, then be forgotten—fairy tales are classics. They are of the heart, not of the glands.

I like that we owe fairy tales to old women. When the idea came to people to collect those of a given region, they began by taking down the tales told by its crones.

What’s your favorite fairy tale? my friend wanted to know.

Any one that has swans in it, I said. I remember, when I first read “The Six Swans,” how I wanted to be the brother whose magic shirt his sister doesn’t have time to finish, so when he’s turned back into a human being he still has one wing.

You wanted to be the freak.

Well, I didn’t think of it that way. Maybe just the different one, I said. The one who gets to keep part of his swan being. That appealed to me.

Here’s something I wonder about, my friend said. They say people love thrillers and horror stories because it’s such fun to escape ordinary life and lose yourself in a world of gruesome violence and crime. Yes?

Yes.

So why aren’t romance novels full of bad sex with smelly people?

That is not a logical analogy.

Okay, never mind. Chemo brain! Just keep reading.