I've spent a lot of time thinking about why I read fiction as opposed to only non-fiction. The information in fiction is fictional — the events didn't happen, the people didn't exist. What does reading about fictional events give you that reading about real events doesn't?

My current answer: fiction gives you access to the inside of experience in a way that non-fiction can approximate but rarely fully achieves. History tells you what happened and what the evidence suggests it felt like. Fiction can show you what it felt like — can put you inside a consciousness experiencing something — with a directness that is possible only when the author has the freedom to imagine rather than constrain themselves to evidence.

This doesn't mean fiction is truer than history. It means it has access to a different kind of truth.