Roman A Clef

The Woman Who Froze in Fargo: where is the line between fact and fiction, and just how strong is it?

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This article by Mike Powell originally appeared on Grantland on 3/18/15. While the piece focuses on two films, it certainly provides food for thought for any novelists who write fact-based fiction, or who work within a ‘this is a true story’ trope.

The new movie ‘Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter’ tells the story of a Japanese woman on a quest for riches who was lured to the brutal cold of the Midwest by a Coen brothers film. The woman was real, even if the story isn’t entirely true. And it’s been told before, by a documentarian. So where is the line between fact and fiction, and just how strong is it?

n November 2001, an unemployed Japanese travel agent named Takako Konishi was found dead outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Nobody knew Konishi was a travel agent, or what she was doing in Detroit Lakes, only that she was young, pretty, and far from home.

About a week earlier, she had checked into a Holiday Inn in Bismarck, North Dakota. The morning after she arrived in Bismarck, a man had seen her wandering around a landfill and offered help. Konishi didn’t speak English, so the man took her to the police, where Konishi showed officers a crudely drawn map of a tree and a road and started repeating a word that soon everyone came to hear as “Fargo.”

Fargo: A city nearly 200 miles east of Bismarck on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, best known for a 1996 Coen brothers movie in which a car salesman hires two men to kidnap his own wife for ransom. Things go wrong (things always go wrong in Coen brothers films) and one of the men ends up killing the other with an ax after an argument about a 1987 Cutlass Ciera, but not before the ax victim buries the ransom in a briefcase in the snow.

A story about Konishi emerged: Here was a woman who had traveled a very long way under the great misunderstanding that the movie Fargo was real. Only one of the officers at the Bismarck Police Department had seen the movie, which, incidentally, opens with a title card that reads: THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

 

Read the full article on Grantland.

 

Is It O.K. to Mine Real Relationships for Literary Material?

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This article by Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison originally appeared on The New York Times Sunday Book Review on 4/22/14.

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. When Robert Lowell used his ex-wife’s letters for his poetry, Elizabeth Bishop told him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.” This week, Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison discuss what they make of mining actual relationships for literary material.

By Francine Prose

Writers need to be careful about putting their children in memoir or in fiction. We’re their custodians.

I’ve been asked this question so often I’ve begun to assume that the world is teeming with aspiring writers wondering what Thanksgiving dinner will be like after they publish that lightly fictionalized exposé of Mom’s actionable parenting skills and Dad’s affair with the babysitter. When asked, I usually reply: “Write what you want. People rarely recognize themselves on the page. And if they do, they’re often flattered that a writer has paid attention.”

Do I believe this? Yes and no. I’m reasonably certain that John Ashcroft didn’t recognize himself disguised as the evil high school guidance counselor in one of my novels. But like so much else, this thorny matter requires consideration on a case-by-case basis. In Mary McCarthy’s story “The Cicerone,” Peggy Guggenheim, the important collector of modern art, appears as Polly Grabbe, an aging, spoiled expatriate slut who collects garden statuary. Guggenheim did recognize herself and was definitely not flattered; it took years before the two women were friends again. Write what you want — but be prepared for the consequences.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Sunday Book Review.