This is a Work of Fiction

They all say that, but to what extent is it really true? Over the years I’ve worried about whether some aspect of a character I have created will strike one of my many relatives as a thinly disguised portrait of one of them. And then they would complain or maybe they’d threaten to sue me. Thecharacters I create are completely imaginary composites of human qualities and histories.My writing is about real places as well as imagined ones and it pertains to and actual events in history.

My publis...