There were two "incidents" last year, of truth meeting fiction, or literature, head on. The first occurred in Norway, when Solveig Ø?strem attacked her (former) friend the author Hanne Ø?rstavik [Nor wikip] for using her as a model for some of the less flattering persons in her stories. The title of the 'article'? "Damned cup of tea" [in Norwegian]
The other kicked off in Sweden, after Per Gunnar Evander released his "I min ungdom speglade jag mig ofta" (in my youth i ofte looked at myself in the mirror). A few months later his daughter attacked the book for its representation of 'truth' regarding , among other things, the relation to her sister who passed away after a car accident in 95.
How should authors deal with writing about their own lives and the people they know? Is there a hard line or a soft line in the sand, shifting in the wind and waves as we move into an even more open world (with blogs, myspace pages and other community profiles making more and more information available on the leaders of tomorrow)?
And then there was a case in the US - as coverd on On The Media; "James Frey's booze-and-drug-fueled memoir A Million Little Pieces was not, strictly speaking, based on truth"
So is it wrong to tell your story as highly fictional - keeping it the way you felt it might have gone or should have been - rather than sticking with the basic 'facts of life'? Or does it only become a problem when a lot of people start to read it, and use it as a guideline or shocking story?
And will a story ever be "true" when it is written by one person? Can we know why other people do or say the things they say? Can we even assume that they actually say what we think they say if we don't see the whole picture - such as body language, or the rest of thconversationon leading up to the statement?
Can we even be sure what we ourselves are actually thinking at any given time - and what is just after the facinterpretationon or rationalization in order to make sense of the events around us?
...and the sun melted a bit of the massive snow outside today...
