Which writers tell the truth?

You don't always find them under 'non-fiction'

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In the first of an occasional series of guest posts by Backstory’s favourite authors, Sophie Elmhirst looks at the line between fiction and non-fiction. Which gets closest to the truth?

Sophie Elmhirst is the author of Maurice and Maralyn, named book of the year at the 2025 Neros and Backstory’s non-fiction book of the year last year.

NO ONE HAD WARNED ME about the humiliating behaviours of a first-time author. I’d been briefed by other writers on the anti-climactic lull that occurs after publication, when the world oddly doesn’t change even though it now contains your book, but no one had admitted, for example, the bookshop skulk. Maybe they were too embarrassed. Or maybe they’d blanked it from their memory. I refuse to believe they didn’t do it.

The skulk is this: you enter a bookshop and lurk, hoping to catch sight of your book in a prominent position on a shelf or table, ideally being pressed into a customer’s hands by a bookseller with a tear coursing down their cheek: “This will change. Your. Life.” You only do this a few times, because in reality your book is often not in the shop at all or tucked well out of sight, surrounded by so many other books that its very existence feels humiliating. It turned out that the one thing the world did not need was another book.

Once, when I was skulking in my local bookshop, I found my book shelved under New Fiction. Maurice and Maralyn is the true story of a married couple in the 1970s who were shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for four months. I hadn’t made it up. And yet, there it was, with its title that sounded a bit like a novel, sitting among actual novels like the new, awkward kid in school, trying to fit in.

I didn’t move it. If anything, its mis-shelving was in keeping with the question I’d been asked often at events: how much of this story was true, and how much had I imagined? I gave a pat answer: I hadn’t imagined anything! It was a true story based on research and interviews. I’d read Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s diaries and books, as well as volumes of press coverage of their shipwreck and rescue, and I’d interviewed many of their friends and relations. I’d combined this with context and colour, drawn from the impressions of Honolulu I’d read in 1970s guidebooks to Hawaii in the British Library, or descriptions of the behaviour of sea turtles and tides that I’d watched in documentaries or read in books about the ocean.

Writing involved moulding this material into a narrative. I wanted to write about Maurice and Maralyn’s lives in a way that would read like a novel rather than a conventional biography or historical account. That is, I’d wanted the book to revolve around character and interiority, to be driven by a sense of narrative progression, rather than the transmitting of information or argument. It was a story, after all. I didn’t see why non-fiction shouldn’t borrow the novel’s devices, or why a non-fiction book couldn’t afford the same unfolding, intimate pleasures of a novel. On the flipside, just because a book doesn’t have footnotes or an index doesn’t mean the story isn’t true.

And yet, I knew I wasn’t quite giving the whole picture. The book also contained speculation and interpretation, the many times where I allowed myself to wonder about these people and come up with theories about their behaviour. It wasn’t fiction, but these parts required imagination, if that word covers the process of trying to understand why people are the way they are.

And what about the omissions? I’d left out whole decades of their lives. The story I’d told was partial, incomplete. I’d done what any writer does, in other words, and shaped the material according to my own design. I could see why the questioners found it hard to know where the factual story ended and my own meddling began.

Truth telling Sophie Elmhirst (pic: Daniel Lamont)

The blurred line between fiction and non-fiction has long energised writers and concerned readers. In the sixties and seventies, the “New Journalism” crew — Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and others — found themselves under scrutiny for the liberties taken in their narrative non-fiction. A reader wants to know what they’re dealing with, what they can rely on, where the boundaries lie and how solid those boundaries are. The writer, I suspect, wants to know what they can get away with. The aim is not deception, but that’s often how it’s seen.

In Mark O’Connell’s recent work of non-fiction, A Thread of Violence, he deals with the fictions surrounding his subject, the murderer Malcolm Macarthur, as much as the facts. (This includes literal fictions: Macarthur had already been the subject of a novel by John Banville.) In an interview, O’Connell admitted that he’d had to leave things out that Macarthur had requested to be off the record. He’d therefore not been able to tell the whole truth. “What even is non-fiction?” said O’Connell. “It is predicated on telling stories and making narratives out of the mess and chaos of reality. I feel that non-fiction is a niche sub-genre of fiction.”

I’m not sure this sub-genre would work in a bookshop. As browsers and readers, we like clear dividing lines. Here are history and biography: stories about real people doing real things for which we have evidence. And here’s fiction: made-up characters doing made-up things, conjured by a writer’s mind. But perform an autopsy on a biography, examine its constituent parts and gaps, and you soon lose your grip on that clarity.

For years, the American writer Janet Malcolm was the chief pathologist of non-fiction. Whatever Malcolm was nominally writing about in the New Yorker or in her books — murderers, journalists, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath — she was also writing about writing; more precisely, the morally compromised process of writing about real people. The biographer, Malcolm wrote, “is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for the reverse image.” A subject, she explained, is filtered through a writer’s consciousness and becomes a victim (her word) of their ambition and bias.

In her essay on the Bloomsbury group, A House of One’s Own, Malcolm gave the example of a biography of Vanessa Bell by Frances Spalding who chose to maintain her affectionate portrait of Bell even after the publication of a brutally unflattering memoir by Bell’s daughter, Angelica. Spalding had made a choice: she had decided on her version of Bell and stuck to it, which is another way of saying she had written a character.

You’d think we’d be more comfortable with the quicksand in fiction. But novelists of all kinds often face similar questions, if from a different perspective. (“How much did you make up?” is replaced by “How much is true?”). In her book, How Should A Person Be?, Sheila Heti, a writer of diaries and autofiction, could not escape the conflation of her character, Sheila, with herself, however much she insisted she’d written a novel. You don’t call a character Sheila to avoid such a conflation: it was part of the project, a purposeful blurring.

Hilary Mantel, meanwhile, often found herself facing suspicious questions about the accuracy of her account of Thomas Cromwell, as if her novelized version should precisely match the historical record. “Readers,” she said in one of her Reith Lectures in 2017, “are touchingly loyal to the first history they learn. If you challenge it, it’s as if you’re taking away their childhoods.” I’d add that readers are uncomfortable with uncertainty, in books as in life. We like to know where we stand, even while knowing that it is the shifting ground of uncertainty that produces the best art.

Mantel points exactly to where she sees the boundary between fiction and fact. “As soon as we die,” she declared, “we enter into fiction.” Her proof is anecdotal: ask two family members to describe another who has recently died, and you won’t receive the same answer. Once someone cannot speak for themselves, they are remembered: an act of creation.

The past is not reproduced in exact copy, it is made and interpreted. There are facts and figures, yes, but as Mantel points out, the same facts and figures are used by different historians to furnish wildly different arguments. Anyway, our evidence is only ever partial. All information about the past is shot with holes. The work of the historian or biographer is to fill in the gaps, or at least create a version of the past or a person which papers over them and appears whole.

So where does this leave us? The other day I heard Andrew O’Hagan, a journalist and novelist, talking about his new book, Caledonian Road. He spoke about the reporting he’d done for the novel, immersing himself in various London communities which he’d then alchemised into fiction. Journalism, he said, can no longer “accept the responsibility” for truth: it had, in recent years, been too compromised by ideology, by partisan groups claiming ownership of the facts and brandishing them like weapons to serve their own ends. “It might in the end in our time ironically be fiction writers who insist on the truth.”

Another way of putting that, perhaps, is that the truth is richer and more complicated than a collection of facts. And while the bald categories of fiction and non-fiction are useful for shelf organisation, they don’t necessarily represent what is going on in the writing itself. When you take raw material and turn it into words, fictionalising happens whether that material is the minutiae of your own life or the beheading of Anne Boleyn. The past is filtered through a human mind and ends up in the approximate form of words on a page. And then what happens? They go to a reader, who performs her own creative act as she decides what she thinks those words mean.

Close to publication, my editor and I decided that we wouldn’t include a photograph of Maurice and Maralyn in my book, though there were many to choose from. She thought — and I agreed — that it might be nice for the reader to imagine what they looked like, rather than be told. I felt, too, that a single photo would somehow be misrepresentative: showing them at a single moment in their lives, while the book tried to tell a longer story of their many phases. In the space where the photograph might have been, I hoped the reader would instead have a whole carousel of mental images to draw on, made from what they’d read. These images would be inaccurate in their specifics, no doubt, but they’d feel closer to the truth.

This article first appeared in the final issue of Backstory magazine.

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Happy reading,

Tom

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