What’s this book about?

I’ve been puttering around on Goodreads (and this blog now heads there too). Goodreads is easily the book-reading website with the widest international reach and the greatest number of lovers of reading.  It’s great for authors too, particularly in this era with old barriers breaking down just like in the music industry.  There are reading groups on Goodreads about all kinds of things, and I am thinking about creating one for lovers of Based-on-a-True-Story books.

I picked a handful to put on the bookshelf (a virtual act for a virtual shelf). Josephine Tey’s classic The Daughter of Time was one of my first picks: a detective story that ‘solves’ the murder of the Princes in the Tower from the reign of the supposed villain Richard III. Then I thought of Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Is that a true story or based on a true story? If you say it’s ‘based’ then you’re arguing that any scenes imagined by Krakauer take it out of the realm of nonfiction.  Since he researched the story with exceptional diligence, that’s not really fair. The same thing may be said of Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre.

I had a similar cataloguing problem with The Priest, the Witch & the Poltergeist. When I first tried to write the story a decade ago I resolved it would be a nonfiction journalistic account.  But there was very little English-language material about the trial.  The story is, of course, better known in France, and I was given a French account called Le diable serait t’il dans le canton? by a very nice French woman with the improbable name of Madame Marzac, who was visiting her husband’s grave at the little church in Cideville once presided over by the priest from the trial. It provided a lot of information.  But imagination was needed to make the story more than an essay.  In fact it was good for it. But agents and publishers kept saying, what genre is it? Fiction or nonfiction? Creative fiction? Historical fiction? One might think yes to that last, but there is a good deal of romance in historical fiction, which is a great improvement on history but not quite true of my little book.

We really need better book categories.  Speculative fiction? Imaginative memoir? Historical fiction romance or mystery? Based on a true story or based on a sketchy anecdote heard in a bar? You be the virtual cataloguer.  It’s one of the few library jobs left.