In light of Edith Stein’s claim concerning the possibility of an unembodied “I” in On the Problem of Empathy, I examine the act of reading as a medium through which the unembodied “I” of the Other can be given. Drawing upon Stein as well as Edmund Husserl’s select observations on empathy and intersubjectivity, I discuss how the very givenness of language qua writing presupposes as well as facilitates the operations of empathy. Following the extension of the locus of empathy from the lived body to the written word of the Other, I outline some of the ways in which empathy operates during the act of reading autobiographies of fictional and actual Others. Significantly, I argue that empathic operations do not undergo modification or neutralization during the reading of fictional autobiographies. Instead, empathy facilitates an epistemic—rather than an ontological—blurring of the distinction between actuality and fictionality. The possibility of such blurring serves as a continuing testament to the wide-ranging scope of the essential human condition of empathy, which in turn highlights the vital importance of Stein’s work for the phenomenology of reading, aesthetic as well as emotional response theories, and fiction studies.