Electric Literature talks to David Shapiro about his new semi-factual novel You’re Not Much Use to Anyone and the reasons why he never wants to write another book like it:
I feel really guilty about it. I feel exploitative. A friend of mine who is the basis for a character asked, “How could you have done this? I never signed up for this. I never thought that you would think of doing something like this.” If someone had written about me as a character in a book the way that I wrote about other people in the book, I don’t know if I could ever look at them or talk to them again. I don’t know if I could ever be in the same room as them again.
