How do you think reading saved Sherman Alexie's life?

Sherman Alexie is a Native American writer from the Spokane, Washington area. He had some challenges as a child that kept him from taking part in some traditional kids' activities, like sports. One of the things that he enjoyed, instead, was reading.
Alexie credits a couple of books with helping him become the person and writer that he grew into. He talks about them in this excerpt from a 2012 interview in the Blue Mesa Review:

The Snowy Day, the picture book by Ezra Jack Keats, which talked about an urban black kid wandering alone in a snowy city. Number one, it was him being a brown-skinned kid, which, back then, there was very little brown-skinned kids’ literature. And also the way he wandered alone, lonely, and okay with the loneliness—that was me. I really saw myself in the book. And it didn’t happen again for years. I mean, I always loved reading, but I felt outside of the books, like an eyewitness rather than a participant. So it didn’t happen again until I read in college Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back, which was an anthology of contemporary Native poetry, and I had that moment again.

Alexie is voicing what is so important about the reading experience and, actually, all artistic experience: finding ourselves in the expression of others. There are countless examples of people who have credited writers with expressing that vision or experience that connects readers to the universe in a life-changing way. Sometimes it takes the experience of others to draw us in and make us realize that we are not alone, that our experiences and thoughts and joy and pain are an integral part of all human experience.
For Alexie, these books helped him connect to the literary experience as a young Native-American––they helped validate his own existence and probably spurred a desire in him to express his own experience and vision.