A woman has a child where the father has abandoned her. Three paragraphs later, the child is in law school. In life we don't want conflict or drama, but in stories we need it. It's the oxygen of fiction. We need to be able to take a look at the darker side of ourselves, our characters.
Fiction is about both drama and conflict, but it is also about healing.
Readers want to know how the character made it through losing a loved one or rearing a child without the help of the absent father. People often use books as bibliotherapy way to heal themselves through reading. Yet there's a healthy balance between writing unflinching fiction that tells the truth and writing fiction that helps heal. As a former social worker, I've worked in the trenches and witnessed some of the darker side of humanity, from domestic violence which ended in death of the mother to burying babies, to servicing AID's baby, so I have to fight that tendency to not only depict the evil in the world in my own fiction. A writer can influence the world by reminding us in a cynical time of all that's good.