At Buzzfeed Books, novelist Catherine Lacey writes about an interview she had with a reporter who assumed Lacey had based the protagonist of her first novel on herself. To an extent, Lacey finds this frustrating, but then she considers the way all writers are and are not their characters:
What I should tell anyone who might ask again is that no fiction writer can honestly tell you what parts of her characters are mutations or facsimiles or pure inventions of the self. There’s no master Venn diagram, no clean delineation between invention and reality. Everyone writes fiction.
