February 20, 2023

There is a genre of scene I believe I had read several times in a certain kind of nonfiction book...

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There is a genre of scene I believe I have read several times in a certain kind of nonfiction book. In this type of scene, the author of the book shows an earlier draft of said book – the very book you are holding in your hands – to a character in the book, or more precisely to a person in the author’s life upon whom one of the characters is based. And this person reacts extremely badly to the manner in which they’ve been portrayed. Which creates a sort of ethical dilemma on the part of the author. Do they remove this character from their book? Or rewrite the character in order to make it more to the liking of the person on whom it is based? Or fictionalize the character even further so as to make it unrecognizable? I have seen different author’s deal with this dilemma in different ways, and it always strikes me as somehow getting to the very heart of the ethical problem of the relationship between fiction and reality.



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