All the work-arounds I thought I had invented—turning two real people into one “fictional” “character,” turning one real person into two characters, changing people’s appearances and nationalities—he already knew about, and viewed as base tricks. He seemed proud of not changing anything, including himself. Was that something it was OK to feel self-righteous about? Was it possible that the kind of book he was describing could somehow be better than the novels I already knew about—better than “psychological literature, with all its fictitious plots”? More pressingly: Was there a way that I could
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