Cascade, the town in my novel of the same name, is loosely based on four towns in Massachusetts that were flooded in the 1930s to create a vast reservoir. Recently, an irate reader wrote to ask why I had invented a fictional town. “I would have enjoyed this book much more if you had chosen one of the four real towns for the setting!”
I was reminded of the scene in SIDEWAYS where Jack’s future father-in-law says to novelist Miles, “I like nonfiction! There is so much to know about this world. I think you read something somebody just invented it—waste of time!”
The best fiction is full of truth, but instead of a treatise, I just wrote back and thanked my reader for reading. And I told her this: that I originally intended to write about the real towns, but soon realized that my story of an artist struggling with leaving her mark in the world needed to be set in a town that had been a real “place to be” in the 1920s, a cultural center with a Shakespeare Theater at its heart. So, like many authors, I superimposed an imagined town over a real piece of land. These drowned towns happened all over the country, all over the world, in fact. The “truth” of what happened is of course very much a part of my book. Anyway, thinking about all this, I was reminded of some favorite, relevant quotes:
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. —Albert Camus
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. –Tennessee Williams