Now for a trickier question: How
indebted do you feel in your fiction to
stick to the historical record—to what
actually happened?
Kline: Novelists who write about real
events constantly wrestle with this
question. Several years ago I did an
event with the writer Lily King, who
wrote Euphoria, based loosely on the
life of Margaret Mead. In our conver-
sation, Lily said that once she gave her
characters fictional names, she freed
herself from any responsibility to ad-
here to the historical record. She used
only the pieces of the real-life story
that interested her and invented the
rest. Of course, some readers com-
plained that it wasn’t factually accu-
rate. Her experience reminded me of
a quote from Hilary Mantel: “Anyone
who writes a novel of this type is vul-
nerable to the complaints of pedants.”
I admire and respect this perspec-
tive, though so far I’ve taken a differ-
ent tack. When I wrote Orphan Train,
I felt a n obl ig at ion to t he 250,0 0 0 t r a i n
riders and their descendants to be as
accurate as possible, knowing that
people would be reading about this
little-known piece of American his-
tory for the first time. In A Piece of the
Worl d, I stuck to the facts of the story
as much as I could because I was writ-
ing about real people, some of whom
are still alive today. Christina Olson
was a complicated woman, and part
of the challenge of that book was fig-
uring out her motivations for actions
that might have appeared callous or
unkind.
Several of the characters in Tin
Ticket also existed in real life. One was
five years old in 1840, when my novel
begins. I changed her age to eight so
that her consciousness would be more
developed, and she’d understand a
little more about what was happening
to her. People who k now her t r ue stor y
may be unhappy about this, but I felt
it was necessary to give depth to her
characterization.Gornick: Writers seem to be all over
the map on this issue. The novelist
Ron Hansen takes his friend Russell
Banks to task for having approached
his novel Cloudsplitter, about the abo-
litionist John Henry, with the assump-
tion “that his obligation to history was
negated as soon as he called the book
a novel.” Hansen states that he finds
Banks’s position “ethically problem-
atic” and quotes law professor Ken
Manaster: “To deceive people about
what was not only is disrespectful, but
a lso u nder m i ne s ou r col lec t ive conver-
sation about our path, hindering our
thinking about what could be.” This
idea seems to me particularly impor-
tant now, when the label “fake news”
is used to attack journalists’ ethical ef-
forts to present their findings, attempts
to distort reality are epidemic, and the
shared understanding of literature is so
scant that I’m frequently asked about
one of my novels: Is it fiction?
One of the things I love about
the Lepore piece you cite is that shethe literary life HISTORICAL FICTIONSEPT OCT 2019 36