When Novelists Tell the Truth, Nobody Believes Them (One Major Theme of this Blog)

Novelists are fiction writers, “professional liars,” as they sometimes like to joke. But they occasionally do tell the truth, sometimes to confidants (like Dickens to Forster and Dolby; see June 2013 post), sometimes in autobiographies and television interviews (like Sue Grafton; see posts). As Mark Twain said, when he told the truth, nobody believed him (see posts).

Part of the reason that novelists are not believed in regard to their normal multiple personality [see blog glossary] is that they like to preserve plausible deniability. They make it look like they could be joking. They don’t insist that you pay attention and believe what they are saying. They tentatively raise the issue, but let it drop, if the interviewer doesn’t want to hear it. Which was the point of my recent post dramatizing what would be likely to happen if a novelist said in an interview that he was only the host personality [see blog glossary].

Novelists will not be straightforward about their normal multiple personality until interviewers and literary critics are interested. As the saying goes, “It takes two people to tell the truth, one to tell it and one to hear it.”