IT WAS A CASUAL SORT OF EVENING—bottles of beer had left wet rings on corner tables, someone was hunched over a laptop fiddling with the playlist, the smokers had claimed their spots on the balcony and were lighting their cigarettes with tealights. I wasn’t entirely at ease, though. My hosts had been kind enough to ask me to read a couple of passages from my debut novel, which was to be published in a few weeks’ time. Even though I was among friends in Mysore, I felt a small sense of disquiet. This would be the first time I had read in public from the completed novel.
It was fine—of course it was. I was grateful to the impressive couple who laughed in all the right places. There was even a bit of applause. But once I had finished, I noticed a delicate change in the atmosphere. It felt as though a cool gust had swept in from the balcony, blowing the tea-lights out on its way.
I later found out from one of the hosts that someone at the party had been a little disconcerted by the reading. He had recognised himself in one of the characters I had read about and, after a few half-hearted sips of his drink, had left in a fug of preoccupation. What else might I have revealed in the book? What had I meant to say about him? Why did I have to write at all? This was a person I barely knew, and he certainly was not the inspiration for the character.
A few months after the novel’s publication, I ran into an acquaintance on the street, a woman in her sixties that I had met on three or four occasions. I remembered talking to her about road works and the weather but little else. She looked pleased to see me but there was something else in her expression—a kind of wounded pride.
“I read your book,” she said.
I was delighted, and told her so.
“You know, your main character, you’ve made her very much like me,” she said.
“Really? Well, yes, I suppose in terms of background and age, she is.”
“Oh, much more than that.”
She tilted her chin and gave me a sharp, knowing look. It was only then that I understood what she meant: she had assumed that I had based my main character on her. I had no idea what to say. To confirm her suspicions would have been to lie; but to deny them felt like an act of hostility, a repudiation of a theory she had carefully worked out for herself.
“Not really,” I said, and looked at my shoes, which is exactly what she would expect a shameless personality-plunderer to do.
“Next time, we can discuss it a little bit if you like,” she said.
Her tone implied she was flattered to have been featured in this way, although she would have welcomed more direct efforts at verisimilitude on my part.
It was only on my way home that I fully registered the implications of her comment: what next time?
Are fiction writers in Delhi and Mumbai approached by readers in the same way? Or is this inability to separate fact from fiction connected to the setting of my novel? Mysore is a small city, with tight-knit social circles, and perhaps it is inevitable that people who live there will try and pinpoint other residents in a novel set here. I had an uncharitable suspicion that readers felt that writers in the metros inhabited a glittering cosmopolitan swirl that enriched their imaginative powers. Meanwhile, the rest of us, in smaller cities, were thought to be banging out a thousand words a day in an attempt to settle scores with our neighbours.
I wondered whether other fiction writers who have written about non-metropolitan India have had similar experiences. The stories in Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land are set in and around Shillong; it is a collection with a strong sense of chronology, perspective and place. Pariat tells me that her stories are populated by hybrids: composites of people she has known and reimagined versions of them. There have been numerous occasions when relatives or acquaintances have told her, with great pride, that they have managed to identify the real people behind her characters. But Pariat also points out that her stories draw on Khasi folklore, which stems from a collective consciousness. It may also be this common cultural pool—tales that belong to all, so to speak—that enables people in Shillong to see themselves in these narratives.
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s debut novel, The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, is a vivid portrait of life in a community of Santhals in Kadamdihi, a fictional village in southern Jharkhand. Shekhar tells me that he based the book on a real village in the region, called Kishoripur, and certain incidents that occurred there—but he does not expect to be approached by readers eager to see themselves in it. The English readership among the Santhals in that part of Jharkand is minuscule, he says; a literary novel in English would simply be invisible in the region.
He pauses for a moment, and then adds: “But if there had been any Santhal readers from Kishoripur, I’m sure they would have been very quick to try and recognise the characters, correctly or not.”
There have always been fiction writers whose works have firmly traced the contours of events and people from their own lives. And there can’t be many novelists or short-story writers who deny the impact of real experiences on the shape of their work. But what I have always loved about fiction is its oblique gaze—the power of an imaginative endeavour to rekindle or recast subjective truths. The point of departure might be a perturbing memory, or a relative’s odd traits, but I like to see these as coordinates that go on to map out a much broader fictive landscape. Real-life episodes—a snappy conversation between strangers, the story of a dead grandparent, the recollection of a disastrous holiday—are all to be planted onto this landscape. Surely, as readers are left to find and interpret new knowledge in the spaces between their own world and this place of make-believe, the author’s own life is of little significance.
In the real world, this is not the case. The novel has been viewed with mistrust from its earliest days. And the suspicion that life is being cannibalised for an insidious art—that fiction is in some way simply a retelling of the author’s own life story—continues today. This is how Vladimir Nabokov, in his biography of Nikolai Gogol, asked the question:
It is strange, the morbid inclination we have to derive satisfaction from the fact…that a work of art is traceable to a “true story”. Is it because we begin to respect ourselves more when we learn that the writer, just like ourselves, was not clever enough to make up a story himself?
Let’s hope not. Perhaps the quest for the actuality that underlies a story is a consequence of the cardinal injunction to “write what you know”; or the interest shown by interviewers and publicists in authors who have a seductive backstory, with a view to locating their work within it; or the overwhelming influence of a confessional culture where every impression is shared. Of course, it may just be that some writers have had atypically interesting lives and feel a natural compulsion to write about them.
But if readers find it difficult to sever these stubborn connections between authors and their fictions, what does this mean for the solitary, immersive experience of reading? What I’ve always associated most with reading a novel is the enclosed space, the flickers that arise only on the page, the intensity of absorbing solely what the book releases. A focus on the author takes us far beyond this realm. We begin to take clues on how to approach the novel from what we know about the author’s life. A game is set in motion, in which we parse the text for what really happened, and who a character really is. With each satisfactory conclusion, we drift further from the book itself. Each reader is fully entitled to determine the merit and boundaries of their own reading experience, so I won’t say that this game devalues it—but it does change it. “I read online that her grandmother was an acrobat for a while. That must be where she got the idea for the contortionist in the final chapters.” The corollary to “write what you know” becomes “read what you think you know.”
Every time I see a reference to the stupendous worldwide success of the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume confessional outpouring, a series titled My Struggle, I return to this detection of fact in fiction. His publishers categorise the books as fiction, but they have been more purposively identified as “confessional novels,” “autobiographical fiction,” “hyperreal memoirs,” and most strikingly, by Ben Lerner in the London Review of Books, as examples of “a Künstlerroman that is also a suicide note.” With sedulous and uncompromising detail, the books deal with the failure of Knausgaard’s marriage, his conflicted feelings about fatherhood, his own father’s alcoholism and death, and his grandmother’s senility. Much of the discussion of the books has focused on the scandal and rupture caused by the revelation of these intimate stories. Family members denounced Knausgaard in an Oslo newspaper, an uncle threatened legal action, his ex-wife made a radio documentary to put forward her version of events, and his second wife reportedly relapsed into depression.
Many writers must, at some point, wonder whether they would be brave enough, or foolish enough, or callous enough, to mine the lives of those whom they know best in order to serve these creative ends. If readers prize facts and experiences over literary conjuring tricks—if some truths are far truer than others—should we not give them what they want? A father’s most guarded anxieties, a mother’s infidelities, a sibling’s addictions: all dusted off and rendered in the service of art. In all likelihood, the world at large would neither know nor care—but a web of intimates would. To picture these private realities gliding down a hard, unflinching line towards a great story; to set them down knowing that they will make your loved ones tremble with anger or shame; to withhold nothing, to disguise nothing; to risk these relationships for a book—should writers resist the temptation? Can they resist it?
I’m grateful that I don’t have to answer that question. I don’t even have to respond unequivocally to questions about where characters really come from. For now, the shape-shifting world of fiction has served me well enough. I remain convinced that satire, allegory, fantasy and fable can all in their different ways be as true as the verifiable facts in an author’s bio. And I cling to the idea that the work of fiction is different from the work of memoir. But who can say in the future? I’m glad I have pleasant memories of that beer-soaked evening. If the invention stops and the confessions begin, I may never be invited anywhere again.