more real than real life
fake news in fiction ✦ and how novels let us transcend our epistemological limitations
In March, I wrote about my deep admiration for the inaugural issue of atmospheric quarterly, a literary magazine cofounded and co-edited by Anthony Garrett and Joely Fitch. I’m pleased to announce that the second issue of atmospheric features my review of Jonathan Buckley’s Tell, a formally experimental and delightfully gossipy novel about a wealthy art collector (and his family, lovers, and sycophants), all told through the perspective of the gardener of his country estate.
There are many things to admire about this novel, but what I’d like to discuss here is how Tell addresses some of the most interesting and eternal questions in literature—and life, really. What does it mean to tell a story about someone else’s life? And how do we separate fact and fiction in the stories we tell?
What is fiction, actually? It’s one of those “definitive terms,” as the literary scholar Catherine Gallagher observed, “that most…have tacitly agreed to leave unexamined.” Here’s one obvious definition: Fiction is a narrative that is partially or entirely imaginary. Nonfiction, in contrast, is a narrative that is true. Novels are fiction; memoirs and autobiography are nonfiction; and poetry—well, poetry is complicated, and usually ignored.1
The fiction/nonfiction divide, Gallagher notes, seems “pervasive and secure”—hardly worth defining. But what about writing that destabilizes these categories?
Take the French writer Constance Debré’s trilogy Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name. The novels are clearly about Debré’s life: her upbringing in an influential French political dynasty, her bourgeois adulthood as a married mother and defence attorney, and how she divorced her husband and quit her job to become a dissolute motorcycle lesbian and writer. But as a Guardian article about her noted:
[T]hough the events are real, Debré firmly considers her work fiction rather than autobiography or memoir, because it relies on the literary art of constructing a narrative, creating a relationship between a character and events. “What makes a novel is its form,” she says.
Or take the (French again, sorry2) writer Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a debut novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s chief of police and the chair of the Wannsee conference. To be clear, the assassination really happened. HHhH is 50% carefully researched historical narrative, and 50% Binet wringing his hands about how to research this topic, how to write about it, and how to resist the urge to turn an act of real-life heroism into mere fiction:
Everyone finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic, or adding coherence to the narrative of a character whose real path probably included too many random ups and downs, insufficiently loaded with significance. It’s because of people like that, forever messing with historical truth just to sell their stories, that an old friend, familiar with all these fictional genres and therefore fatally accustomed to these processes of glib falsification, can say to me in innocent surprise: “Oh, really, it’s not invented?” No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of “inventing” Nazism?
Binet’s problem, of course, is he wants to write a great story. And the level of detail we expect from a story—dialogue, inner monologue and motivations, outfits, body language—isn’t always available in the historical record. Historians are familiar with the many omissions, silences, and biases of what information is archived—and what isn’t. So what can a writer do? One key moment that Binet struggles to write is the first meeting between his heroes, the Czechoslovakian resistance operatives Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. “I’m not sure yet if I’m going to “visualize” (that is, invent!) this meeting or not,” he frets in HHhH. “If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything.”
Fiction is often disrespectful—defying definitions, gleefully abandoning conventions—in order to tell a really good story. One way to do this is to take real-life events and transform them, as Debré and Binet do. Another way to do this is to take fictional events and dress them up as fact. Writers can borrow the conventions of journalism and nonfiction writing to create a story that feels more real than real life.
It’s this second approach of writing that I want to linger on, and how it shows up in a number of novels I’ve admired lately: Jonathan Buckley’s Tell (2024);
’s Biography of X (2023); and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (1998/2007).3I’ve found Catherine Gallagher’s work—especially “The Rise of Fictionality”—useful in understanding what draws me to these 3 novels, with their intriguing blend of fact and fiction.
The story of someone else’s life
The first thing I noticed about Buckley’s novel Tell is the form. The story unfolds through five interview transcripts, featuring an unnamed speaker and an interviewer who is represented by small traces in the text: [Inaudible] or [Indistinct]. Reading these one-sided conversations creates a feeling of uncertain voyeurism—what’s the story about? Who’s involved? Who is the speaker? Why is the interview happening?
It turns out the speaker is a woman who works as a gardener for a spectacularly wealthy man, with a grand old house in Scotland filled with contemporary art. Tell isn’t about her, though—like the narrator in Rachel Cusk’s Outline, she leaves herself deliberately vague (even more vague than in Cusk’s novel, actually) in order to tell the story of this wealthy man and everyone else around him: a deceased wife, two disappointing sons, enigmatic lovers, professional associates, and the other staff. But the gardener’s judgments come out quite strongly in the stories she tells about others. As she says to her interviewer,
My mother, she always used to say that you can summarize a person with just one story. Absolutely anybody. Capture their whole character in a single scene. There’ll be one story, one anecdote, that tells you exactly who they are. I know that nobody is the same with everyone they meet. We show some people one side, other people another. I agree. But there’s someone at the center of it, someone who is me. The one who appears when there’s no show to put on. I can’t see that it’s a controversial idea. We all know there are things we would do and things we wouldn’t do, because of who we are. It’s like the Day of Judgement. Your soul gets weighed in the balance. Same thing. A single story gets put on the scales.
This is certainly true of the characters in novels—they exist within this novel (and maybe a sequel) and nowhere else, so in a very real sense, there really is just one story that articulates who they are, the essential quality of their being. As Gallagher writes in “The Rise of Fictionality,” about the invention of fiction as a concept, characters “are at once utterly finished and also necessarily incomplete.” They are finished because everything about them is contained within the novel—there is nowhere else we can learn about them. But they’re incomplete in that they’re not real, obviously—if a character’s knees are never described, say, we’ll never know if they have a small scab from a cycling accident as a child. We’ll never know if they have other friends or lovers that didn’t appear in this novel, but were responsible for the character’s experience of affection, care, trauma, guilt. Real people have these things—they have hidden scars and psychological detritus that you might come to learn about, over many years. Characters don’t.4
But perhaps this quality of incompleteness exists in the real world, too. As long as your loved ones are still alive, you can look forward to speaking to them, drawing out their stories, learning more about their lives. Death cuts us off from certain forms of knowledge: I won’t ever know more about my grandmother’s thoughts and feelings than I do now. I might be able to learn, through others, unexpected facets of her—a childhood memory of how she raised my mother, perhaps, or an anecdote from a family holiday that my sister went on and I didn’t. But my knowledge of her will always be incomplete.
And it’s this unfinished quality that is so appealing about the beginning of
’s novel Biography of X, which pretends to be a biography written by C.M. Lucca, the grieving widow of a prominent multidisciplinary artist named X. Right from the start, Lucca confesses to understanding very little about her deceased wife. “When she died,” she tells us, “all I knew about X’s distant past was that she’d arrived in New York in 1972. She never told me her birthdate or birthplace, and she never adequately explained why these things were kept secret.” Elsewhere, she says that X “layered fictions within her life as a kind of performance or, at times, a shield.”You probably know someone like this: furtive, secretive (possibly a Scorpio), invested in maintaining elaborate fictions about themselves. Maybe you’ve fallen in love with someone like this. “I soon accepted,” Lucca writes about X, that “she would be both the center of my life and its central mystery.”
Let’s pretend to fall in love
A confession. I’ve probably cried because a novel twice as often as I’ve cried because an ex, if not more. Strange, isn’t it? Going to sleep distraught over a story, being moved to tears by the struggles of someone who doesn’t exist, someone who was created purely to activate that emotional response…which seems, if you really think about it, a bit naive. As Gallagher notes, eighteenth-century critics would sometimes bemoan the “extraordinary readiness” of readers to sympathize with characters:
We already know…that all of our fictional emotions are by their nature excessive because they are emotions about nobody, and yet the knowledge does not reform us.
This emotional investment can often feel “absurd” and “embarrassing,” Gallagher writes. But it happens anyway. Something about the fictionality seems to invite and even encourage that outsized response. A friend of mine won’t cry in front of the women he dates, but confessed to tearing up—very occasionally, mind you—when watching a film. Something about fiction lets us experience greater catharsis and expression than we might be able to access in our ordinary lives. Or, as Gallagher would put it: Fiction establishes “a protected affective enclosure that encourage[s] risk-free emotional investment.”
One of the most intriguing arguments Gallagher makes is that this ability to pretend, to suspend our disbelief and have an emotional experience, manifested in a very specific way in modern times. “Modernity is fiction-friendly,” she writes, “because it encourages disbelief, speculation, and credit.” She explicitly links the speculation involved in romance with the speculation of a market or capitalist economy:
Women especially would need to be able to imagine what it would be like to love a particular man without committing themselves, for loving a man before he had proposed was still considered highly improper. As in courtship, so also in commerce. One thinks immediately of merchants and insurers calculating risks, or of investors extending credit on small collateral and reasoning that the greater the risk the higher the profit, but no enterprise could prosper without some degree of imaginative play.
This connection between fantasies of love and speculative finance is an intriguing one (and also explored in the sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou’s book Speculative Communities, especially the chapter on dating apps and Love Island–style reality TV shows). When we read novels about love, we often project ourselves into the characters, trying to understand how we might feel with this encounter, this crush, this situationship, this difficulty standing between us and our happily ever (romantic) after. We might be doing something similar when we fill out our profiles or swipe through the profiles of others—creating stories and narratives about what romances are possible.
Escaping our epistemological limitations
Fiction gives us access to what we’d desperately like to know about others: their inner thoughts and motivations. What are you thinking about? we ask others, knowing that we might never get a real answer. In fiction, however, someone’s entire consciousness is offered up to us. “The distinctive sign of fictionality,” Gallagher writes, “appears when the narrator depicts the subjectivity, or consciousness, of a character.”
Narratorial omniscience…and representations of interior monologues, for example, all portray the “intimate subjective experiences of…characters, the here and now of their lives to which no real observer could ever [access] in real life.” [quoting Dorrit Cohn]
Many of my favorite novels—especially those by the great modernists: Proust, Virginia Woolf—have this quality. The minute, obscure machinations of the mind are all rendered with remarkable detail and richness; we come to understand the protagonist of In Search of Lost Time, or characters like Mrs. Dalloway and Lily Briscoe, almost better than we understand ourselves. We encounter, in Gallagher’s words, an “unprecedented representational thoroughness.” A great writer can make a character seem like
a preexisting creature with multiple levels of existence, a surface and recesses, an exterior and interior. We seem to encounter something with the layers of a person but without the usual epistemological constraints on our knowledge.
This privileged access to someone’s interiority, however, can often feel unrealistic. Of course, everything is unreal in the novel—but the novelist needs to draw us in, construct a world in which the obviously fake can be seen as more real than real life, more emotionally moving, more saturated with experience.
Enter the framing device. In Jonathan Buckley’s Tell, we learn that the gardener is being interviewed for a documentary about her employer, Curtis Doyle. In Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, the widow is moved—by grief and fury—to write a biography of her wife that refutes the numerous inaccuracies and distortions of an earlier biography. In Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, the novel begins as the diary of a seventeen-year-old law student, Juan García Madero, who would rather study literature. He’s invited to join a new literary movement called “visceral realism,” and the novel describes the people involved and their friends, lovers, enemies, and heroes.
These framing devices draw us in, even though—as the novels continue—it becomes quite clear that these conceits can’t quite justify the amount of information, scenic detail, and faithfully rendered dialogue offered up to us. As I write in my review of Tell:
We don’t question how the gardener can know so much about Curtis, the novelistic detail, the scenes she’s describing where she’s not even there, she would have heard about it secondhand. We don’t question everything we’ve come to know about a man who doesn’t even get to tell his own story.
And in Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, the ordinary diaristic conceits (“November 5: No news of my friends,” Madero writes, and then: “November 6: Cut class again today”) are interspersed with fully realized scenes of Madero speaking to Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the founding poets of visceral realism; Madero flirting awkwardly with women at bars; and Madero writing down, with perfect recall, details of the books his friends carry with them, the food everyone’s eating, the play-by-play body language of people moving in a room. Most people don’t have this kind of memory!5 But fictional characters often do.
Fake news in fiction
How can we tell which of these details are “real”—that is, reflecting something about our world as readers—and which ones are “fictional” or fake, invented for the novel? What’s interesting about these 3 novels is their virtuosic investment in conveying fictional details that don’t just seem realistic but real. A novelist writing about a city where property developers and city officials are locked in regulatory struggle is being realistic. A novelist who writes about a setting called “Mexico City” is invoking reality—or so we think.
Buckley’s novel Tell features realistic depictions of art and architecture—in language that felt so much like a work of art criticism that I struggled to believe that Buckley was inventing paintings and buildings, instead of describing ones I might have seen in an image. Early on, the gardener describes a painting hung up in her employer’s Scottish residence:
Years ago, he bought this massive photograph of the sea. The sea and the sky. Black and white. Grey and grey, more like. A wide expanse of dullness. Slightly different greys, and a bit of a shine on the water, but no waves. The water as smooth-looking as the sky, as if everything was made of metal. I overheard Karolina talking to him, after it had gone up in the hall. It looked quite good there. Not something I’d want to live with, but it looked nice, all that grey against the white. And she was talking to him about it and about the photographer. Japanese, he was.
Part of me believes that Buckley is describing a real work—one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes, perhaps? But another passage, where the gardener describes a small shed on the grounds, seems to contradict that:
We called it the hut, or the shed, but it wasn’t a shed. It was a hut in the same way a crown is a hat. It was a deluxe cabin in the woods. A beautiful little building. It won some award. From the house, it was invisible, and it stayed invisible until you were almost on top of it. Not exactly camouflaged, but it blended in with the trees and the water. And it had grass growing on the roof. Very clever the way it was done. The walls are all wood. Burned wood. It’s a Japanese thing, apparently. But the architect wasn’t Japanese. Finnish. Akseli Lehtinen.
I remember reading this paragraph, putting down the book, and eagerly googling the architect. He doesn’t exist. But I’ve spent so many years reading articles from Hyperallergic (on art) and designboom (on architecture and design), and Buckley’s prose realistically conveys how someone might, in conversation, talk about real art and real architecture. I was taken in, fooled—I believed in the fiction.
Bolaño does this too—the visceral realist movement in The Savage Detectives is described with such careful attention (the founding poets of the movement, their predecessors, their key texts and independent publications, the lineage they sought to work in) that I began to think it was an actual movement, and Bolaño’s novel an homage to the visceral realists. But it isn’t real—although Bolaño did draw from his real-life experiences as one of the founders of Infrarealism.
Lacey’s Biography of X does something similar—inventing an influential American artist. Part of what makes Lacey’s approach so compelling is that she includes real-life figures and institutions into X’s story. In the novel, X collaborates with Kathy Acker and is profiled by Susan Sontag (“X’s occasional friend and occasional enemy”). The biography that X’s wife detests so much is reviewed by Merve Emre, the intensely productive real-world critic who frequently writes about women writers and women artists—it makes sense that, in this fictional world, she would have been aware of X. To back this up, Lacey includes fake footnotes citing the fictional prior biography of X, X’s fictional archives at a fictional New York museum, fictional articles about X in Artforum, the New York Times and the Village Voice.
And Lacey goes further—fabricating not just X’s life but a radically different America for her to live in. As Joumana Khatib writes in her review of the novel, Lacey
envisions an alternate U.S. — one in which the country broke apart and the vast majority of the South seceded in 1945, establishing a patriarchal theocracy that lasted for decades. In this history, the political activist Emma Goldman became the governor of Illinois and eventually F.D.R.’s chief of staff, pushing for the New Deal to include protections for same-sex marriage and immigration rights.
In the novel, Lacey narrates all this with the staid, calm voice of a journalist. There are fictional footnotes here, too—of a Renata Adler book, Nowhere to Go: A Month Undercover in the Southern Territory, which is entirely made up. These historical details are clearly fictional, but I found them compelling because they seemed just shy of reality, using historical activists and politicians to create a world that has the same elements as ours (government officials, activist agendas, civil rights debates), with slightly different outcomes.
By stealing the style of real-life nonfiction (journalism, memoir, criticism), all 3 novels create stories that feel more real than real life. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has suggested that art can act as “crystallizations of ordinary human experiences” that appear in real life, but often with less intensity and refinement. Art and literature can take those experiences and make them more compelling, more detailed, more moving—more real, to us, than real life itself.
Five recent favorites
A diaristic review of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days film ✦ Sophie Hughes’s process for translating Spanish to English ✦ A charming 1980s ad for fruit floppy disks ✦ A fashion object I can’t stop thinking about ✦ Calligraphy for Clairo’s new album
Christine Lai reviews Wim Wenders’s film Perfect Days ✦
I feel very honored to be published in this atmospheric quarterly alongside Christine Lai, who writes fiction (her debut novel Landscapes came out last year) and criticism. In “Cycles of Light and Memory: Reflections on Perfect Days,” Lai writes a film diary that meditates on Wim Wenders’s films, work and labor, and the strange perceptive nature of photography:
Hirayama’s snapshots of the tree, and his subsequent developing and archiving of the photos (in neatly labeled boxes) is, in some ways, his true work, sustained by his paid labor as a toilet cleaner. His life is about the quiet repetition, the slowness, of creative work. It is about making something small and exquisite, with tenderness and dedication, something that exists outside the marketplace. I admire the fact that Hirayama’s photos are never shared with others, never made into products to be publicly admired or denigrated; in private, art-making remains a way of living, of being by oneself, untethered from the expectations and criticism of others…In this sense, Perfect Days shares greater affinity with Wenders’s superb documentaries on artists. Photography–and all art-making–involves forms of sustained, impassioned attention to the world, and offers an electrifying way of dwelling in the continuous present.
I think of the little boy in Edward Yang’s 2000 film, Yi Yi (another film I have started to watch repeatedly), who takes up photography in order to show others the half of reality that they are unable to see. Arguably, this is the function of film, too, of all art: to render visible that which we cannot see, to bring into the light that which had hitherto remained in the shadows.
For more on Edward Yang’s Yi Yi—and Yang’s background as a tech worker before turning to film—here’s a post I wrote in January!
Sophie Hughes on translating Spanish literature to English ✦
In a recent post about process work and exposing the patient, laborious revision process, I wrote: “There’s a certain kind of writing advice that I am desperate to find, and that is actual examples—case studies, if you will—of how other people revise their writing.”
A few days after writing this, the New York Times published a wonderful example of how literary translators revise a single sentence. Here’s Sophie Hughes—best known for her translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (#82 on the NYT’s list of the best books of the 21st century)—on the art of translation, and how she goes through 5 different drafts of a single sentence.
A beautiful 1980s ad for Toshiba ✦
Earlier this year, I declared that 2024 was the “anti-algorithm year for cultural consumption.” Sadly for my ideals, but happily for my interest in graphic design, the Instagram algorithm surfaced this beautiful magazine ad from 1987 advertising Toshiba floppy disks. I love the cherry illustration and the contrast between the low-resolution cherry, on the left, and the higher-fidelity cherry on the right. You can get the smooth contours and beautiful color shading of the right—if you buy these new, higher-capacity floppy disks!
A fashion object I can’t stop thinking about ✦
The cherry graphic above reminded me of one of my favorite fashion objects ever: the cherry handbag 🍒 from Undercover’s S/S 2015 collection. Undercover was founded by the Japanese fashion designer Jun Takahashi, and many graphics and motifs are inspired by Takahashi’s love for music and British punk (he’s a huge fan of Vivienne Westwood).
Takahashi’s womenswear is often frilly, frivolous, whimsical, and nearly childlike—but often with an unexpected edge, like the brass knuckles handle on the bag below:
Also—if you have 120 minutes to kill, you can listen to some of Takahashi’s Spotify playlists, which he created for the 120-minute drive from his home to his studio in the mountains. (I learned this—along with all my fashion addict friends—from Derrick Gee’s Tiktok in January 2023)
Calligraphy for Clairo’s new album ✦
Tucked into a corner of the album art for Charm—the bedroom pop star Clairo’s third studio album—is a lovely bit of italic calligraphy:
The calligraphy is by Bijan Berahimi, who shared some sketches and process work on Instagram this week. I love how the strokes of each letter flow into the next. The long stroke of the l sweeping into the finial of the a (here’s Monograph’s quick glossary of typographic terms, btw!)…and the ir combo, with the lilting, lighthearted horizontal stroke of the r.
I spent nearly 2 years in undergrad studying calligraphy with Myrna Rosen, and I remember obsessing over that lowercase italic r. It was so easy for that little lilt to become too angular, too awkward, too unbalanced. But when I got it right—and when you’re writing in ink, that means getting it right off of muscle memory, intuition, the instinctual ease that comes from writing the same r hundreds of times—it felt immensely, gorgeously, wholly satisfying to create a single perfect letter with my pen.
What I learned from calligraphy is that any craft requires hours of practice, hours of drilling the same movements, the same actions. Each visible outcome—from a single letter to an entire book—is the result of the creator’s patient, disciplined devotion. The more I practiced my italic letterforms, the more I began to feel that beauty was not unattainable—it was inevitable, it would arrive if I made attempt after attempt at accessing it.
This newsletter is also practice. What am I practicing? Writing; putting my work out there; trying to say something about literature and learning and life and aesthetics that feels fresh somehow, relevant to the present moment.
Once again, thank you for reading and for being here!
In Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, a character proposes a different categorical approach:
All literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.
It’s worth noting that Bolaño began his literary career as a poet, before shifting to novels in his forties, largely for financial reasons. (Poets have better style but make less money than novelists. This seems to aggravate many poets, who switch genres to a) show up their prose-bound counterparts and b) cash larger checks.)
Other poets-turned-novelists include Ben Lerner, who achieved some fame as a poet and then extraordinary fame as a novelist. And Olga Ravn, a Danish writer who published 2 poetry collections before her acclaimed debut novel The Employees, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. (I recommended The Employees in my Atlantic article on six novels and memoirs with sublime sensory language!)
I’m a big believer in nominative determinism—the idea that people gravitate towards occupations, interests, and lifestyles which conform to their names. My parents chose the name Céline for me when they immigrated to the US (believing, possibly incorrectly, that a French name would be easier for Americans to pronounce than my Việt name)…and I’m convinced that this is why I am a) obsessed with French literature, and b) continually preoccupied with questions of (anti/de–)colonialism and how people from marginalized backgrounds might relate to a literary canon. I happen to like the canon, but that feeling is, of course, always complicated. In an interesting way! I like a little bit of complication in life!
The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer in 2007.
Which is maybe why fan fiction writers enjoy inventing or elaborating on a character’s backstory so much!
This becomes a problem for the memoirist, or the writer who wants to turn their life into fiction. I wrote about this problem in my review of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries:
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle appears to be the result of an extraordinarily precise memory, where minor events are recalled in perfect detail. Heti has described meeting Knausgaard and asking about a scene from his childhood, where he watched his mother peel potatoes on New Year’s Eve. ‘Was that a real memory?’ Heti asked. It wasn’t. Knausgaard had made it up.
Why resist the idea that writers of fiction are, well, writing – constructing, arranging, fictionalising? Even Heti is susceptible to this; she admitted afterwards that she was disappointed by Knausgaard’s revelation. But she’s a novelist with a conflicted relationship to fiction. In Alphabetical Diaries, constructed from over 10 years of her diaries, she tells herself: ‘Don’t make up stories. Don’t make yourself a god’. But she also frets about her poor memory and unobservant nature, and the limitations this poses for her writing. ‘What,’ Heti asks herself, ‘can a person accomplish in fiction without a memory?’
I truly love the way you write, and think. Every time i finish a new missive of yours it makes me want to be a better person. Not in a sad way, in a happy way! You're an inspiring creator, writer, person. Thanks for being here for us, Celine <3
Great post!
On the de-colonization front, I'd strongly recommend 'Kill Everything That Moves' by Nick Turse. Really upends a lot of Vietnamese war narratives.