Bring up that weird thing that you think is so odd no one will ever identify with – that people always identify with.
The weirdest one that ever got mewas when an author wrote about the fascination with high places and standing on the edge and a compulsion to jump just to see what it would feel like. That’s really the point at which I understood what strange critters people are.
People have lots of things like that embedded deep inside them. Universal secrets, if you will. Those always resonate – and quite powerfully, too, since they’re secrets.
That’s how you create reader identification: by creating very human characters. Human the way we actually are, not how we’d like to believe we are.