Does your creative process differ substantially when you're writing nonfiction versus fiction? Who By Fire must have required a great deal of research and complex plot development, so I imagine that made it a different type of writing? Did you know what was going to happen to each character before you started writing, or did that picture develop as the novel took shape?

Mary L. Tabor I never write from the place of “knowing”. I write from the place of “not knowing” and am on a journey of discovery. And that applies to both my non-fiction and my fiction.

But the novel Who by Fire did work the memoir couldn’t do. Here’s why.

I put aside this novel that was finished when my husband, said after 22 years of marriage, oh-so-Greta-Garbo, “I need to live alone.”

This event stopped me in my tracks—and eventually I blogged my life while I was living it. And that turned into the memoir (Re)Making Love. That book like Who by Fire is a love story but oddly one that fiction would probably not find credible.

You know the line: Truth is stranger than fiction?

I have a twist on that one. I learned through these two books that the fictional account of my story has greater emotional truth and intellectual significance than the factual one that you can find online and in the 2011 Valentine’s Day issue of Real Simple Magazine where my husband and I tell our story.

Here’s how I learned what the so-called real story didn’t reveal and how I learned the difference between the writing of the memoir and the writing of the novel.

I am the reader for the audible.com version of Who by Fire. While reading it aloud in an NPR recording studio, I discovered my own book as if for the first time.

I realized I’d written this novel to find the man I somehow knew on the unconscious level I was losing.

Good fiction, meaning you know while you’re reading that the writer is risking her life, can go to this place of hard truth in a way that memoir because of its hold on the so-called facts can’t do.

So in the novel, what you get is the close-to the bone story that answers the question, Can memory lead to forgiveness?

I had to write the novel to find out.

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