I find, when making new acquaintances, that everyone believes they know the story of how I met my wife, having read, at some point in their life and for pleasure or under instruction, my debut novel, Biding Time.
What I have to remind them, again and again, is that the novel is fiction.
Yes, I acknowledge that the book itself is loosely based on real events. However, I would caution any reader against assuming that they can guess which parts really happened, and which did not.
It is all, I assure you, a fiction.
The scene by the fountain in the town square never happened. Neither did the episode in the Winter Garden – you know the one I’m talking about.
The truth, as it so often is, was much more prosaic, but also far more powerful for me.
And that’s the core of my reason for writing these memoirs – not so that people in the street stop assuming that the lies they have read about me are true, but to show the importance of truth in fiction. If the real events had not happened, there may never have been a novel. But, conversely, if I hadn’t written the novel, the real events may not have happened, either.
So, pay attention to the truth, and listen to what is hidden in the fiction. For one is useless without the other.
From the notebooks of Nathaniel Drury