The bestselling author of the Neapolitan novels muses on the confluence of reality and fantasyI can’t trace a line of separation between fiction and nonfiction. Let’s say I occupy an notion for a story in which,at the age of 48, in an empty country house in winter, and I am locked in the shower cubicle,I can’t turn the water off, the hot water is used up. Did that really happen to me? No. Did it happen to a person I know? Yes. Was that person 48? No.
Why then do I construct a story in the first person, or as if it had happened to me? Why do I say it was winter when,in fact, it was summer, and why do I say the hot water was used up when it wasn’t,why do I make the woman’s imprisonment final for hours, when the actual person got out in five minutes, and why do I complicate the story with many other events,with feelings, anxieties, and frightened reflections,when the event recounted is a small, unimportant episode? Because – I could acknowledge – I am trying to make fiction by following a course that Gogol summarised like this: Give me any small everyday event and I will make a five-act play.
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Source: guardian.co.uk