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X. P. Callahan's avatar

Even a grocery list, as my mentor used to say.

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Lev Raphael's avatar

And the spaces in between.....

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Susan Oleksiw's avatar

I like your wife's take on those questions from readers. On my first book tour, for my first mystery, I was asked more than once, "Is that character your mother?" It still surprises me, but I can understand it better now. Yes, it's all autobiographical in one sense, but the reader's questions are also autobiographical in another.

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Lev Raphael's avatar

Husband, actually, and editor. :-) I moderated a panel where crime writer Ian Rankin told a story that his father insisted that a nun in one of Rankin's novels was *him.*

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Susan Oleksiw's avatar

Oops! Apologies.

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Lev Raphael's avatar

No worries. My fault--"spouse" is ambiguous.

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Jeanne Blum Lesinski's avatar

I've long used writing to process my life experiences and to imagine others. It makes sense to me [not life necessarily, but the process of writing about it]. :D

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Oct 4, 2023
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Lev Raphael's avatar

The supposed distinction makes me chuckle. How is anyone supposed to write memoir, for example, if not of themself?

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Ernie Brill's avatar

What about Flush? Can not that be consider her memoir about her dog?

And what about Moby Dick? Is the longstanding rumor true that Meville's editor insisted on changing the orginan title from Mobina Deck to the more masculine associative Moody Dick (which was deemed obscene by the same judge who hung everyone in the Cruciible Case) AND, much more IMPORTANTLY, cut out all the section- about one hundred pages, of the brief but torrid afair betwen Mobina Deck and Ahab who wound up not having a leg to stand on, of coouses

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Ernie Brill's avatar

This may be one of the reasons more and more young people are leaving College English Deparments. It is a nice, clean ob where it ishard to gt hurt. You spend 4-6 years in spedup grad classes and you are now some kind of expert on Thoreau or Edth Wharton. You mght start and semistarve at 40-45 graand ayear ( you have a very different american jingo idea about starvation). Too cynical? Look around.

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