Is that me in your book?
Most people understand there is an occupational hazard implicit in knowing/meeting/befriending/being related to/marrying a fiction writer. There is always the risk of ending up a character in that writer’s work, and nine times out of ten, whatever the writer thinks of you personally, that fictional portrait will be distinctly unflattering.
In The Guardian, David Jenkins takes a look at literary self-recognition, having had it happen to him twice:
A friend has just published his first novel, The Paradise Trail. Like its author, it’s clever, charming and funny. It opens in a hippie hotel in Calcutta, in December 1971, where two freaks are writing a mock rock opera about the hippie trail, called Hepatitis! One, the protagonist, is handsome, witty, Scots, has recently resigned from an advertising agency and is soon to be entwined with a gorgeous photojournalist. The other is a balding, portly American called Larry.
Spool back 36 years, and there were Duncan Campbell (the author of the book, as well as a distinguished journalist on this paper) and I, lolling below the monkey temple in Kathmandu, writing a mock rock opera about the hippie trail called Hepatitis! (Then, any musical worth its salt had an exclamation mark in its title). Duncan was handsome, witty, Scots and had recently resigned from an advertising agency; I was less handsome, less witty and Welsh.
Balding! Portly! American! How could Duncan do it to me? The “American” I can just about take (it’s important for the plot), but the “balding”? Why, Duncan once told me I’d first attracted his attention in the Delhi dosshouse where we met because he thought I was a girl, so luxuriant was my hennaed hair.
I haven’t been so upset since another friend, Sam Llewellyn, gave my name to the lead character in his seafaring thriller, The Iron Hotel. According to the blurb, the book was “a powerful examination of one man’s attempt to impose some rightness on a world that’s wrong from bottom to top”. I rang him to comment on the nobility he’d conferred on my good name. “Yes,” he said, “I was taking the piss.”
I think using bits and pieces of people you know is perfectly acceptable, as long as
a) you’re being respectful and/or humourous,
b) the people you use probably wouldn’t mind anyway, and
c) very few readers would actually get the underlying reference anyway.
If the writer is determined to be unflattering in print to an aquaintance, well, the relationship probably wasn’t that great to begin with.
That said, I love it when real people grace the pages of a fiction novel. I’ve done it myself, and it’s a gas.
yeah, I’ve done it, too. I’m just now realizing that they might someday get out of jail…