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Aug
26
Writing real people into fiction?
2009 at 10am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
I read an interesting post on The Guardian’s book blog last week about the issues related to novelists using real people as characters. While the author of that article focuses mostly on privacy and whether authors have the right to use real people as characters, what I want to know is: how do you feel about it?
When Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife came out last summer, I devoured it in two sittings. It was a fun, scandalicious read, even though I did think it could have been shorter, but I just couldn’t quite love it. Why?
Because I knew the main character was not-so-loosely based on Laura Bush, and the whole thing where novelists imagine real people into their stories just doesn’t work for me. It seems somehow lazy and opportunistic, at least when the real people become the central characters of an unreal tale, and especially when the book is clearly intended to stir up controversy and create a buzz. (It doesn’t help that American Wife‘s release coincided with the 2008 Republican National Convention, either. Brilliant marketing, but it rubbed me the wrong way.)
Ms. Sittenfeld wrote a pretty good book, but could she have been equally successful with a similar book not based on a real woman whose husband was the most divisive president in recent memory? Probably not. And that just doesn’t sit well with me.
It is what’s kept me away from Loving Frank and T.C. Boyle’s The Women, though I’ve been interested in both of them, and it’s made me reticent to pick up The Hours, even though I’m almost positive I’d like it, and Sunnyside, which looks downright wonderful. Sure, these historical figures make for compelling stories, but can authors who have never known them really re-create their inner lives and do them any justice? Even if they can, should they?
Now, I’m not altogether opposed to seeing real people appear in fiction. In fact, I appreciate it when authors include political figures and celebrities from their chosen era on the periphery of stories because it provides context. It gives me a way to get my footing if the time or place I’m reading about is relatively foreign. And I sometimes enjoy it when authors imagine fictional people into real-life events. Wally Lamb does it when he puts Caelum and Maureen Quirk in Columbine High School in The Hour I First Believed. Jamie Ford does it in Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. Kathryn Stockett uses everyday folks in the middle of the civil rights movement in The Help, with a little contextual boost provided by characters who discuss real-life events that give the story weight and increased presence.
So it can work, this business of writing real people into fiction, but I think it’s tricky business and best done in small doses.
What about you? What were your reactions to the books I’ve mentioned here? Have you read anything else that fits this model and was really well done? Or not? Let’s talk about it.
I think it depends on whether the real people/situation occurred long enough ago in the past to qualify, for me, as historical fiction. I really liked Loving Frank (you should read it!), where all the participants are deceased, but I see what you mean about American Wife being a little lazy. I thought it was more wishful thinking than laziness, though.
This is how I feel about it: I have no problem using a mixture of 2 or 3 people to make a character, and of course dreaming up a mishmash of people is always okay. But when you base a “fictional” character off of one person, that is bordering on not being “fiction” anymore. Not only is it lazy, but it is also just plain bad ethics if you ask me.
You make a good point, Lorin, and it’s one I didn’t really think of because I don’t read much historical fiction. I think I might have to give Loving Frank a try, but as a criterion, all of the people being deceased would be quite enough for me. I think they’d need to be from a time period far enough away for the book to feel like actual imagining instead of wishful thinking (though I agree about that and American Wife, to a degree). Philippa Gregory and re-imagining the Tudors? I have no problem.
I love historical fiction, so I read a ton of books with real people in them. To some extent, this means it annoys me when they’re needlessly villainized or manipulated to serve a story’s purpose when clearly such a thing is not what happened in real life. The further back you go, the more imagining it is, though, so even history takes on an aspect of fiction. I enjoyed American Wife too, but it was strange for it to be based on a person still living and breathing and thinking. I think that it’s acceptable when the person has died and everyone who would have known them first-hand has died, unless they are just an incidental secondary character.
I just read Loving Frank, by the way. It was a book I liked but didn’t love, and it made me very curious about the real people involved and whether everything in the book actually happened.
Oh, nothing beats the creepiness of “real person” fan fiction. Especially the adult stuff.
I agree with you about the sketchy marketing of American Wife. It felt very disrespectful. I don’t think it was wrong per se to write a book about a character based on Laura Bush as long as the author changed a lot, but I would’ve waited a few years after her husband was out of office.
Having read many of the books you mentioned, I am now wondering if I have (and have had and didn’t know it!) a penchant for this “new” genre of fiction. I read Loving Frank about a year ago with my book group, and although not our favorite read, it did generate an interesting discussion, and with most books like this, a further delving and interest into the real people in the novel. I also just picked up TC Boyle’s The Women at the library just yesterday, I like his writing style and was interested for comparison purposes to read his take on the same events and people .
I enjoyed The Hours, and also recently read Vanessa and Virginia, a fictional take on the sister’s relationship and lives, especially because it was written from Vanessa Bell’s point of view. But I can definitely separate fact from fiction. I know these books are fictional, regardless of how swept up I may get in the action or events of the book.
I loved the The Hour I First Believed, Hotel on the Corner and The Help–all great books this year, dealing with real life events and fictional characters. I guess to some extent they are historical fiction. Anything that happened yesterday is now history. The use of the events of 9/11 are so often used in books as a turning point or time marker within a story’s frame work it seems to becoming commonplace. The Reluctant Fundamentalist would be one of those novels, and there are so many more I hardly know where to start naming them.
I didn’t read the Sittenfield novel, not really my cup of tea anyway, but like all the other novels talked about, they are very popular and usually bestsellers–very readable, because the reader can relate–they are already familiar and know something about these people and events. The Da Vinci Code, with its episodic, tiny chapters, less than stellar writing, and musings on Jesus’s possible sex life sold over 80 million copies world wide. That’s proof right there–people don’t mind fancying how things might have happened differently.
I have a much bigger problem (personally) with those memoirs written by people who have wild imaginations and suddenly crazy interesting lives. When you call something true and it never really happened that way. I don’t think writing is lazy anyway, not everyone can do it–but I do appreciate honesty. I don’t think it is invasive to write a work of fiction and suppose about someone’s life, as long as you are very clear that you are writing a novel, not a biography or memoir. I enjoy these kinds of book and often pick them up–The Lambs of London, Becoming Jane, the Woodsburner (Henry David Thoreau), Hitler’s Niece, The Last Witchfnder, etc. All novels that use real people in fictional settings. I also like memoirs, and they can certainly be as fascinating as a novel–the Glass Castle, Angela’s Ashes, Warm Springs.
Anyway, I have no problem with the model presented, whatever it may be called!
When I read the first paragraph of this post, my initial reaction was wha!? because of course all good character in novels are based on real people. Maybe a tiny sliver of a real person, or maybe a mish-mash, but if they are completely fabricated, I think you can feel it (say, like Buffy as a character — utterly stylized. Entertaining, but profoundly not real).
However, as I read further, I found my head nodding along. For me, I think it’s the laziness factor. I don’t mind fictionalized historical characters, if they are long dead. The author is having to put just as much work into making that work as they would a completely make believe character.
But a currently living character? Hm. I’m not a fan of those. It gets uncomfortably close to how I feel when I’m reading a book that seems to have a rather unveiled, tactless version of the author as the main character. It feels . . . lazy. It makes me doubt their writing ability. What, you could only write about yourself? You couldn’t shape a 3D character apart from what you directly knew? And the basing it on a real person who is alive feels that same way — what, you couldn’t create a new one? You had to steal their mannerisms, their life, their conflict to make your novel work?
I tend to steer clear of novels that are obvious commentaries that way.
I’m a big fan of Diana Gabaldon, and I think that most of the time, she uses real people well. However, my problem is that all too often (even with her), it comes off as “Now appearing in a cameo!” Kind of like when Brad Pitt guest starred on “Friends” or when President Obama showed up on “Saturday Night Live.” It feels awkward, somehow, and I often have a hard time reading those passages.
Thanks for helping making the distinction clearer, Maggie! Of course authors will base characters on people they know in real life or borrow certain traits or create mash-ups. My problem is the “laziness factor,” as you call it, and the fact that it feels cheap when the real-life person they’re borrowing from is a celebrity instead of someone with whom they’re personally acquainted. And if they happen to be writing about a celebrity with whom they are personally acquainted? That’s a fine line to walk, and it very easily turns into literary name dropping.
I definitely agree with you. In primary school, they used to make us write a lot of stories like that – ‘Write Henry VII’s diary for the day’ and such – and I hated it even then. It’s not necessarily that they’re real people that I don’t like – it’s the fact that it’s mixing what’s real and what isn’t. If a novel is about some fairly anonymous person in some normal place, at least it doesn’t have that jarring quality where you know it isn’t real.
That said, I’m reading The Hour I First Believed at the moment and I’m very impressed with how well it’s been done. I think the degree of separation – that it was Maureen who was in the school but Caelum who talks about it – helps a lot: everyone has a friend who knows someone who was involved in something remarkable and it gives it that extra pinch of reality.
This is a wonderful discussion starter – one that I’ve dabbled into every now and then on other blogs. Personally, I don’t care – a good story is a good story and public figures are going to be misrepresented all the time. I feel like it seems to come with the territory. The majority of people who are your biggest fans or biggest haters will never actually KNOW you. Instead, they will create an image, a story, of you in their minds that feed their love/hate. And isn’t that what authors do when they decide to include real people in their fictional stories? They do what we all subconsciously do in our heads on paper. When that happens to turn into a deliciously scandalous or interesting story I’ll pick it up. It won’t change my perception of the person because it’s fiction. And I believe that fiction should be limitless, even if it requires a little boost from reality.
As an occasional writer myself, I can’t help but realize that I base a lot of my characters loosely on reality. I start with something that I know well and then fill in the blanks with my imagination. I understand that not everyone is going to appreciate that kind of fiction – but I love it!
I had a hard time with Wally Lamb using Columbine. It felt like he was exploiting a tragedy for his book. So while I did like the novel, I still have unresolved feelings about Maureen being so involved. I understand why he did, and that it wouldn’t be the same novel without it, but it still bugs me.
Which is weird, because I don’t normally have that reaction. Maybe because it’s such a recent event?
I’ve read plenty of historical fiction with real and imagined characters, and didn’t have any issues. I’ve even read fictionalized accounts of historical figures lives that I’ve really liked (The Last Queen and Lucrezia come to mind).
[...] Writing real people into fiction? [...]
Fascinating topic. I found this blog because wordpress linked to a blog I wrote on a similar topic “Real people in fictional stories.” I write historical novels with fictional main characters, but I have real historical people as secondary characters, sometimes major secondary characters. It’s a delicate balancing act. I try to read as many letters, diaries, memoirs as possible to get inside the person’s head. And if I have real people doing fictional things (which inevitably they do in a fictional story), I try to stick to things that that person *might* have done based on the historical record. So for instance if someone is known to have had a number of love affairs, I would feel okay having them involved in a fictional love affair. But to do the same with someone who is known to have been a devoted and faithful husband or wife would seem like cheating.
I can’t believe I didn’t see this post before. It’s excellent and thought provoking.
I think for me whether actual people in a novel work depends on how recent the history is. When the person is still alive, I have to wonder about the motivation of the author. Quite frankly, I don’t really want to have to read a novel when I’m wondering about that. That is why I didn’t have any interest in American Wife. I was/still am tired of hearing about anything to do with that particular president. Enough is enough if you ask me. Loving Frank was a decent read for me. I don’t think that my not loving it had much to do with the real-life characters.
I’m a huge fan of Tudor fiction, so having actual people in my fiction doesn’t bother me. Still, people are very concerned still about their reputations as well.
It’s a tough call and a very interesting topic.