How Literature Can Shape Our Understanding of Our Life History

I've argued elsewhere that successful stories/novels have to be about more than just characters wandering around doing stuff. A lot of the manuscripts I see crossing my desk have things happening, characters struggling, but which leave me wondering if there was a point to the story.

Horror/fantasy writer, Den Valdron, provides a powerful essay on the opposite: how a story where not much happens had a profound influence on his understanding of his own life history by providing the central metaphor for his lifestory: http://denvaldron.com/2020/01/08/h-p-lovecraft-and-me/

"That’s what good writing is, I guess. It’s more than just description and people and things happening to other things. It’s all that, and that’s fine, it’s even great. But really good writing touches who we are, it makes us feel, it makes us see ourselves in it, and see it in ourselves. It shows us things."