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Emma Donoghue and the ethics of true crime inspired novels

Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue’s latest novel Room had buzz from the start. First, the bidding war – won by Picador U.K. for an advance rumoured to be in the £1 million range – then its place on the Man Booker longlist.  There has also been a fair amount of reaction to the fact that the book was inspired in part by the sensational case of Austrian Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in a basement for 24 years. Drawing on real life crimes is a subject that often provokes accusations of exploitation, (something Michael Winter talks about in the September issue of Q&Q with regard to his new novel, The Death of Donna Whalen, BTW). Donoghue tells the Guardian that these accusations were painful to hear and entirely inaccurate:

“A lot of people made out I was writing this sinister, money-making book to exploit the grief of victims. I was thinking, it’s not like that, but no one will know until they read it.”

She is keen, too, to contextualise the link between her novel and the Fritzl case. “To say Room is based on the Fritzl case is too strong,” she says firmly. “I’d say it was triggered by it. The newspaper reports of Felix Fritzl [Elisabeth's son], aged five, emerging into a world he didn’t know about, put the idea into my head. That notion of the wide-eyed child emerging into the world like a Martian coming to Earth: it seized me.”

Donoghue says she deliberately avoided giving the readers much about the perpetrator of the crime:

Once he’s arrested he disappears, because I refuse to be that interested in him. As a society we’ve given disproportionate attention to the psychopaths – the average thriller is about a psychopath who wants to rape and chop up a woman. I wanted to focus on how a woman could create normal love in a box.

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