At first, readers’ assumptions about the non-fictionality of my fiction made me defensive (I made it up! That’s why it’s called FICTION!). But then, like your (other) friend, the defensiveness morphed into an appreciation/recognition that readers were commenting on the believability of the work.

Many readers have assumed I have 1. experienced the disappearance of a loved one 2. lost someone close to me as a teenager 3. hate my older sibling. None are true. But what is surprisingly nice about these assumptions is that many readers have shared their own – often deeply intimate – experiences of these three things, because they believe I can relate. Which I can. Even if my empathy comes from having deeply imagined the situation rather than actually having experienced it.

“Of course, I understand the misapprehension. I mean, I tell people I’m writing about a family living in South Florida in the 1980s and 90s — what are they supposed to think?”

I wish more non-writers appreciated the fact that familiarity doesn’t equal truth. It’s not like if you grew up in South Florida in the 80′s and 90′s that your own family was the only one you were exposed to. Fiction is observation and imagination, and of course both of those are heavily influenced by your particular life. But they are also influenced by the things you read and watch and create. We all know what a love story is not because we each experience love in the same way, but because we observe love and hear stories about love and knew about Romeo and Juliet before we ever had our first kiss or crush.

Sometimes I think a more realistic question is how could we ever write about just one single person, one single relationship, or one single time when we take in so much more?