The Roman à Clef: Enough Already!
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
I was talking with my friend, novelist Susan Barr-Toman, about the reaction she was getting to her then just-published novel, When Love Was Clean Underwear. Because the book takes place in South Philly, where she grew up, many readers were assumed it was an autobiographical novel. It wasn't.
In the opening scene, the protagonist kills her own mother. And so when readers asked Susan if the book was based on her life, she would respond: "No, my mother is still alive."
"I'm a novelist," she groused to me. "I make things up. That's what novelists do." We joked about coming up with a promotional campaign for her book that would carry the tagline: "It came from her imagination."
At a recent reading and Q&A about her new novel Henna House, writer Nomi Eve was asked by an audience member about the inspiration for her book about a Jewish family in Yemen in the 1920s. The reader asked the author if she were from Yemen. Eve explained that she is not, and went on to tell about the woman who inspired her to write this story and about that part of the world.
"My job as a fiction writer is to imagine myself in other people's skin," Eve explained. "Every day writers sit down to imagine themselves [to be] people that they are not. That is our job — to step into other people's lives."
Eve mentioned her three children, born between when her first novel, The Family Orchard, was published, and the publication of this second novel. They go to school in the morning, she said, and then she writes. At the end of the school day, they come home. "What did you do today, Mommy?" they ask. Her reply: "I made things up."
Writing teachers the world over tell their students to "write what you know." It's no surprise then, that when taking on the challenging task of writing fiction, writers would draw upon their own experiences. Nor is there anything wrong with doing so. But the novel that results is fiction.
So stop asking all those authors if their books are based on real-life experience. Stop assuming when you read the books that those things actually happened to those writers. They're novelists. They make things up. Just ask Susan's mother.
