Good morning, all!

My new book, Husband & Wife, came out this week, and I started giving readings from it on Tuesday. It’s a first-person account of a woman’s post-romance romance. She learns at the beginning of the novel that her husband cheated on her, and spends the rest of it trying to decide whether to stay with him, or perhaps start a new relationship with another man. Because I write in the first person about realistic situations, I’m often asked whether my books are “true,” so I’ve already had to explain a couple times this week that my husband (poor guy) is not the philanderer that the husband in the book is.

I don’t mind this question, exactly. I don’t think it’s wrong to assume that  a writer’s life makes its way into her work, even if she writes about Vikings or vampires. But if I wanted to write true stories about myself I’d write memoir, not fiction, so sometimes it frustrates me that people assume I’ve written memoir anyway. Sometimes I wish I wrote about Vikings or vampires. Or vampire Vikings! Then no one would ask if it was true.

I wonder why we’re so interested in the question of how much of a novel came from life. Does it change the way you read a book to know it might have an autobiographical basis? Does it make it seem more authentic? When I read I like to be swept up entirely into an imagined world. As a kid I read a lot of fantasy and romance. I loved Madeleine L’Engle’s books, and Anne McCaffrey, and The Dark is Rising series, and as a teen I read stacks and stacks of Harlequin novels. I liked the fact that Anne McCaffrey’s Pern wasn’t real, and yet seemed so intensely real that you could practically live there. I don’t feel that differently about realistic fiction. I still want to be absorbed completely by the story and the characters, so that too much knowledge of the writer’s actual life is somewhat distracting.

What do you think? Does it help or hurt your reading of a book to know what parts of it came from the writer’s life? Do you want to know?