The Blurry Line Between Fiction and Reality

In a recent interview with my local radio station, I was asked if I write about real people. My answer was a very adamant no. This was not a fabricated response.

But.

It is not an entirely truthful one either. 

When Her Guilty Secret, my most recent book came out, my older daughter came into my bedroom, holding the book up triumphantly. She read a line of the story back at me. “This is totally Olivia, isn’t it?” she asked, referring to her little sister. The child in the book was eight, the same age as my daughter, but the book had been written several years earlier. No, I told her, it wasn’t. She went on to read more, a description of the child’s clinginess to her mother, her hair slipping from its ponytail, a patch of eczema. “This is Olivia!” she insisted. No, it’s not, I told her. But was it? 

Her Guilty Secret is the story of four college friends who reunite for a weekend away twenty years after graduation. Each chapter opens with a form of digital communication, often a text thread between the four women. The story was inspired by a weekend getaway I had with four friends, a group with whom I also have a regular text thread that looks very similar to the one featured in the story. I knew this as I wrote it, of course, but it wasn’t until it appeared in print and my friends read it that I fully realized how much our own correspondence had seeped into the book. 

This was not the first where there were similarities between my books and reality. In my first novel, The Bloom Girls, the character of the father very much resembles my own father in terms of profession and interests. Unlike my father, this character was accused of sexual misconduct when working in a school, and I imagine this similarity caused a few raised eyebrows and jokes at my father’s expense. Had I intended to model this character after my father? I’m not sure. 

My second novel, This Bright Beauty was inspired by a newspaper article I stumbled across one day. A tragic story involving a car accident, twin sisters, and their children, I was drawn into the story and found myself imagining the lives beyond the black and white print. The resulting novel deviated from the real-life events, but if you knew what you were looking for, you could likely find the tiny germ that grew into the book.

Everybody Lies was inspired by a real-life murder in Ireland that my husband told me about over dinner one night. It takes place on an island very much like Martha’s Vineyard, where I live. However, I intentionally fictionalized the setting partly because I wanted the creative license to change things and not be bound to reality. But there was a bigger part of me that wanted to be able to write about issues that affect my island—addiction, class, isolation—without actually writing about my island. Did I fool anyone? Absolutely not. Anyone who has lived through a winter on the island would be able to recognize Martha’s Vineyard, but I was able to write more freely under the guise of fiction. 

Write what you know. This is a tidbit of advice that young writers receive as early as middle school. Write what you know does not mean write about real life, but it does mean to look at the world you know, the one you inhabit, and to find the stories within it. As writers, we’re trained to look at the world and to mine it for material, and I often view the world through the lens of fiction.

Daily I find myself writing in my head, describing the beginning of spring or a bird perched on a branch, some unknown narrator scribbling away inside my brain as I drive to work or go for a walk.  I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that my first thought after hearing a story from a friend or learning about an event in my hometown, is often, “This would make a great book.” When the pandemic first struck, despite my own fear and worry, a little voice whispered, “This would make a great setting!” There is no shutting down the voice of the writer. 

Yet as I write a story, even one drawn from real life with characters who may be partly inspired by actual people, the process is transformative. While I may start with a character based loosely on someone real, by the end of the writing, it’s no longer that yoga teacher or that friend of a friend or that person I read about in the paper. By the end of the writing, they have taken on a life of their own. They have become the character in the book, walking and talking in the world I’ve created, one that is sometimes more real to me than the one I actually live in.

Is there a salaciousness to this? Is it wrong to take the tragedies, private conflicts and heartbreaks of real people and turn it into a story, whose main purpose is to entertain? Perhaps, although one could argue that this is one of the purposes of art. However, if done well, if done generously, the writing can also be an act of honoring. Fictionalizing real life allows me to examine the world, to observe and empathize with the people around me in a profound way, at a slower and more mindful pace and on a deeper level than I’m able to do in “real life.” By writing about others, I’m able to see my own life reflected back at me more clearly.

So was my daughter, right? Was the eight-year-old in my book her little sister? No, she was not. But then again, I guess she actually was.

—

Emily Cavanagh is a writer and teacher. She is the author ofThe Bloom Girls, This Bright Beauty, Everybody Lies, and, most recently, Her Guilty Secret. She lives on the island of Martha’s Vineyard with her family. You can read more about her life and work at emilycavanaghauthor.com.

 

HER GUILTY SECRET, Emily Cavanagh

“Just brilliant. I loved this book… Addictive, fast paced, packed with twists, this one had me absolutely transfixed. I did not want it to end.” NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Let’s play truth or dare, for old times’ sake…”

I reluctantly agree, silently praying none of my three oldest friends gets the chance to ask me a truth. There is so much I’ve been keeping from them. Just for this weekend, for our long-awaited college reunion, I want to put all that aside and have some fun.

But it wasn’t my secrets I should have been worried about. It was theirs.

When Ada draws truth, she can’t meet my eye. “Ivy…” she begins and then stops. Before saying something that I immediately wish she could take back.

But of course she can’t, not now.

The worst thing is no one else seems as shocked. I realise they have let me think I was to blame all these years. Perhaps I never knew my closest friends to begin with. Maybe we were never actually friends all…

A gripping, emotional drama about the complexities of friendship and what truly lies beneath the image of a perfect life. Fans of Liane Moriarty, Kerry Fisher and Sally Hepworth will be hooked from the very first page.

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