ONCE upon a time, I bought several books (Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed among others) for a man whom I believed was in love with me. He immediately gave them to another girl, pretending that he had spent hours deciding on the perfect reading material for her. As it turned out, he was practically illiterate anyway. And cheap.
The above paragraph is from a short story I am writing. Fiction? Of course! Or is it? Even when you make up every detail in a story, no matter how fantastic the plot and how crazy the characters, readers will insist that you’ve based it all on your life or yourself.