Lisa Glatt's new novel is The Nakeds.From her Q & A with Margaret Gray for the Los Angeles Times:
"The Nakeds" is autobiographical. But it's not a memoir. It's a novel. What do you think compels you to transform your experiences into fiction?--Marshal Zeringue
What happened with both [my previous novel] "A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That," which was inspired by my mother's breast cancer, and "The Nakeds" is that I started writing about a situation I wanted to explore. I first wrote about the car accident in my first book of short stories, "The Apple's Bruise." In that story, which was also about Hannah, a girl bully appeared. Then, when I was starting to write the novel, the boy who hit Hannah hit and ran. And that became really important to the book, and it's the factually inaccurate thing I wrote about. I realized that without fiction's permission to lie and tell stories, I'm not really interested in the exact truth that happened.
So the person who hit you didn't run?
He hit and stopped and dealt with the situation. He wasn't drunk. But in terms of making fiction, as I'm writing away he ran, and then I realized, wow: the guilt and the regret of leaving the accident. That's why I'm a fiction writer. There's a really different thing going on. I'm interested in that line of mining one's life but being completely open to going off track. I start with this thing that's very true, knowing that I'm going to be making things up, putting...[read on]