let's not pretend

I’m just as guilty of it as anyone. When I read All Fours, I thought, well, this is obviously just Miranda July telling us about something that happened to her. Like, there might be fiction in the details and in the way things ultimately pan out, but the bones of the story are clearly not made up. Even without knowing how much the characters look and feel like her own household, if you know anything about Miranda July, you’d have to think that, right?

Ms. July, who recently turned 50, is aware that readers may conflate the protagonist in “All Fours” with herself. The notion that her work is autobiographical has followed her since she wrote, directed and starred in “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2005, when she was 31. And she sometimes inflects her characters with her own habits or ailments — like the passing throat condition she embellished and gave to the protagonist of her last novel, “The First Bad Man.” But she says she never intended them to be her avatars.

In the new book, she has borrowed a bit more from life. “The only way I can put it really is ‘closer to the bone,’” she said. “But it is still fiction.”

-“She Wrote the First Great Perimenopause Novel” -New York Times, 6 Aug 2024

Yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever, Miranda.

But I even do it to my own authors. When I read Bibi Berki’s The Youngster, I was pretty sure she had to have spent some time in the hospital with Covid, as did my proofreader. Upon asking her, though: not really. She did research, obviously, but it was just her skill as an author that made the story convincing.

I’m concerned about this phenomenon for Six Mile Store (obligatory pre-order link), not because I have a hugely inflated opinion of my own skill, but because so much of the setting is, in fact, entirely real: the store itself (it’s actually the Eight Mile Store, but Eminem ruined that title for me 23 years ago), its (historical) physical description, where exactly it sits in both time and space, and most details of the surrounding town. Not a single character is real, but many are amalgams of real people.

And then there’s me. I’m not in the book. I am, however, writing about a young woman, Honey, who is about my age. She’s working there in 1998, which I also did (but by the time the book starts, in real life I had quit because of an incident with some beans¹). And Honey and I have had some similar experiences, as it turns out. But everything, EVERYTHING, is fiction. None of the characters are real, none of the situations are real.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever, Miranda.

So I wonder how other authors cope with this. In some cases, it’s probably quite mild—I mean, nobody is going to judge Bibi for having Covid or not having Covid—but in other cases, I bet it’s a chore. That is, I definitely judge Miranda July in the same way I judged Chris Kraus when I read I Love Dick² (which is wonderful, but with a similarly bonkers female protagonist), and I’m sure other people do too.

So if you write an entirely fictional book with a main character who looks an awful lot like you, how do you cope? What is it like to walk around under the weight of undeserved judgment? And do we as readers have an obligation to take an author’s word for it that their fiction is entirely fiction?

1. maybe one day I will tell you about the beans

2. your homework is to read I Love Dick