If ever I become a rich and famous author and have to answer a question about what in my writing is drawn from real life, I am so plagiarizing this from Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale.
Readers... are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.
Except when I say it, I'll cuss a lot. 'Cause I'm, like, all edgy and shit. Yeah.
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