Telling all

Some memoirs and autobiographies are described as "tell-all" books, suggesting that they reveal the dirty secrets of the author and those of the people he or she has known. Yet Ralph Keyes in his book The Courage to Write says this: "Even though novelists and short story writers ostensibly deal in fantasy, they are the most self-exposed authors of all."

I doubt that this is always true. Sometimes fiction really is fiction. This is usually the case with lower-grade fiction, formula fiction, genre fiction. Such stories have more to do with plot than characters and more to do with actions than emotions. Yet even these books reveal what the author's fantasies are about — hot romance, gun-blazing adventure, travel to imaginary worlds, etc. 

But mainly what Keyes is talking about is more literary fiction where writers tell stories that are supposedly fiction yet are based on their own experiences and feelings. "To create authentic feelings in their characters, they must first call up their own," Keyes writes.

Pat Conroy

And so often the characters and situations in fiction reflect real people and real situations. This is especially true of first novels, which are so often autobiographical. Harper Lee told us about herself in To Kill a Mockingbird. J.D. Salinger told us about himself in The Catcher in the Rye. And so on. Names and places are changed, yet the truth remains.

When Pat Conroy wrote The Great Santini, supposedly a work of fiction, Keyes tells us that Conroy's own family and others close to him knew very well that he was actually writing about his own abusive father. This fictional story was his own true story, a tell-all book in the form of a novel.