When we read a fictional novel, we all know it’s fiction, which means the story never actually happened. Somebody just made it up. Fictional novels are not “authentic” in this sense, but their emotions are (or can be) authentic. What we have in our modern times is a fictional novel where the emotions are supposed to be authentic yet it turns out that it was a calculated composition based on marketing research. That is, there was nobody who sincerely wanted to convey those emotions for their own sake.
