“Historical fiction” sounds like an oxymoron. Don’t the needs of honoring the factual past clash with the freewheeling impulses of fiction? Or can fiction enrich the documentary record with imagined layers of nuance, complexity, and even discovery? Yes and yes.
Recently on Twitter a writer remarked that she had to stop reading historical fiction about an era she knew well, because the mistakes she noticed were so irritating. I flinched when I read that, partly because she’s very knowledgeable about my novels’ setting of New York in the 1920s. Was she reading Relative Fortunes, I wondered, or an advance copy of Passing Fancies? I felt the overhead swoosh of every writer’s double–edged sword: delight to learn someone’s actually reading your work, but fear that they’ll find some damning fault with it.
I think of history and fiction as two poles of a narrative spectrum. You could also call those poles fact and imagination. All authors who write realistic fiction, historical or contemporary, find their own comfort zone somewhere on that continuum. We want to craft a setting that readers will accept as believable, where they’ll be able settle in comfortably—and then enjoy the show wrought by our imaginations.
My comfort zone skews toward the fiction end of the scale. For this reason my mysteries rarely include historical figures per se, because the need to respect their biographical framework feels too limiting. In Passing Fancies, for example, the American publisher Horace Liveright appears as a minor character. Everything about him in the novel—his habits, tastes, workplace, and so on—is governed by my research about him.
For substantial characters I prefer to use real people simply as inspiration, regarding them as a kind of template I can flesh out in ways that serve my story and themes. Fictional names underscore the distinction. In Passing Fancies one of Liveright’s editors is a character named Billie Fischer. She bears some strong resemblances to Dorothy Parker (who moved in Liveright’s circles but never worked for him), but unlike that famous ascerbic wit, Billie’s also a vicious bigot.
There’s a risk in this approach, though. Knowledgeable readers who recognize the models for my characters also spot the many liberties I’ve taken with them, and they may consider those departures “mistakes.” (Of course I can and do make real mistakes—putting Julia on an ocean liner that was decommissioned the previous year, for example—but that’s another matter. I didn’t do that, for the record, but only thanks to last minute double-checking.)
In the end, I believe historical fiction should thoroughly evoke the past. For me that means rendering the spirit and style of an era with plenty of accurate, verifiable detail, but also giving myself enough narrative wiggle room to let my story and characters develop fully. As a novelist, I’m more committed to cultural and emotional truths than literal ones.
One writer’s mistakes can be another writer’s epiphanies. And we’re both right.
Photo: A young Dorothy Parker (not Billie Fischer) in 1921.
