A fictional town can have residents better known to you than the people on your street.

Invented people can be better known to you than actual neighbours, because you were given their interior lives and never asked for anyone’s on your street. Fiction hands over the inside; proximity hands over only the outside. Knowledge follows access, not distance.

That is not a reason to stop reading. It is a reason to notice how little it takes for a real person to become knowable: a question, an answer listened to, once. The people nearest you are as complicated as anyone in a novel and simply have not been narrated to you yet.