A propos of my recent post on my “Imagining the Past” blog (“A Real Tear Jerker”), last night I saw a movie that took my point to extraordinary lengths.

The movie is Ruby Sparks, which I found utterly charming. In my post, I wrote about the weirdness of feeling tears streaming down my face while writing the final chapter of my novel (or at least the first draft). How could I be sobbing over characters I had invented myself? How could they have come to seem so real?

In “Ruby Sparks,” Calvin Weir-Fields (a novelist so paralyzed by the acclaim his first early novel received that he’s unable to write another word) not only sheds tears over his fictional creation, he falls in love with her. And then she comes to life. Not in the metaphorical sense I was talking about, but in the flesh. Other people can see, hear, and interact with her. She takes up residence in Calvin’s house.

The movie is, ultimately, about the need to relinquish control over someone if you’re going to have a real relationship. After manipulating Ruby in all sorts of ways (he has her suddenly speaking fluent French, suddenly filled with a yearning need for him, suddenly intensely joyful—all depending on his own needs), Calvin learns to let her be herself.

I’ve certainly had the sensation, as a writer of fiction, of jerking my characters around the way Calvin jerks Ruby. No, I don’t want her to do this, I want her to do that … And presto change-o, suddenly the character does X instead of Y.

But while it’s true that authors manipulate their characters in all sorts of ways, they’re bound by the limits of what those characters demand. If Calvin had actually been writing a novel about Ruby, instead of just adding sentences to a manuscript in a locked drawer, he would have felt more constrained—that is, if he was really the successful novelist that he’s portrayed as being. You can’t just make your character suddenly speak French, or feel needy, or be joyful. Unless there was some reason for her to do those things, a reader would throw aside the novel in frustration. In fiction as in life, you have to let people be true to themselves. Otherwise they won’t ever seem real.

And in life, it’s not just romantic relationships that require us to relinquish control. We also need to, inevitably, with our children —a subject that, to some extent, is a concern of my novel The Mother Daughter Show–and it can be a lot more difficult. There’s a period in parent-child relationships when the parent does need to exercise control, because if they don’t, their children will almost inevitably suffer some pretty grievous injuries. So the difficulty is in making the transition from a relationship where one party is justifiably controlling to one where the parties are, if not equals, then at least fairly autonomous.

Just like Calvin, parents have to learn to let go, to allow themselves to be rebuffed, even to see the object of their deep affection make some mistakes. It isn’t easy to create living, breathing fictional characters—from a strictly biological standpoint, it’s a lot easier to create living, breathing human beings (although the labor pains are sometimes similar). But learning to stand back and acknowledge the independence of those real human beings can be more of a challenge—especially when we don’t have it in our power to ensure a happy ending.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (a metaphor that is now obsolete, and also perhaps inapt because it assumes that there are people who are reading my blog posts regularly), I’m going to plunge once again into that worried and worrying subject, the relationship between fact and fiction.

This particular foray is prompted by having just come across a piece in the Sunday New York Times of a while back (July 15, to be exact) by the novelist Colm Toibin. In the essay, Toibin talks about remembering his mother walking to work one morning in 1968, wearing a red coat, traversing a number of real streets that he names. But then he crosses a mental street of his own, traveling from (to borrow his metaphor) the solid land of fact to the watery terrain of fiction: he imagines his mother’s thoughts, and he gives her a singing voice—which, he says, she did not have. “The shape of the story requires that she have a singing voice,” he writes; “it is the shape of the story rather than the shape of life that dictates what is added and excised.”

So far, so good: I can relate to this, as a writer. When I was writing my novel The Mother Daughter Show, which was inspired by a real-life experience, I engaged in the process that Toibin is describing, taking real events and real people and adding and subtracting from them according to the needs of my story. In the process, the people in my novel became fully realized, three-dimensional fictional characters—to me, at least. To some readers, they apparently seemed like caricatures or distortions of the real people they knew, or even of themselves.

Toibin more or less acknowledges that these real people have “rights,” as he puts it, “to be left alone, not transformed.” But to him, these rights seem “ludicrous.” He feels, he says, that he has no responsibilities to these people, but only rights of his own—presumably, to write whatever he wants to. And his only responsibility, he maintains, is to “the reader,” someone he may never meet, not to “people I have known and loved.”

Toibin cites other authors who have, in this sense, betrayed people they loved by fictionalizing them: Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Brian Moore. Mann, for example, “wrote a story suggesting that his wife had had an incestuous relationship with her twin brother.” And yet, Toibin says, no one considered these writers to be bad people. It was only when they put on their writers’ hats that “their soft hearts became stony.”

It’s here that I have to part company with Toibin—and, I suppose, Mann, Beckett, and Moore, assuming they shared his lack of qualms about what they were doing. I do feel a responsibility to those I have known and loved, and I don’t feel that my “rights” as a writer override theirs. I couldn’t write a fictionalized version of someone I was close to, even if in my own head the character I created was a separate being from his or her real-life model. As I’ve learned from my experience with The Mother Daughter Show, that wouldn’t guarantee that anyone else would see the character the same way.

To be honest, while I hoped that people who had some familiarity with the real Mother-Daughter Show in which I participated would view my novel as fiction—and while I thought that the many invented aspects of the book would help to ensure that—I did worry that some people would be offended. If I’d still been a parent at the school where the show took place, knowing that I’d have to continue to interact on a regular basis with individuals who thought I’d caricatured them, I doubt I would have written the novel. And I can’t imagine taking that risk with a friend or a relative. All I can say is that Thomas Mann’s wife must have had superhuman qualities of forbearance; I’m not sure I would have been able to put up with the story he concocted, and I’m a writer myself.

One irony inherent in my own experience is that I left journalism (and, to some extent, essay writing) for fiction largely because I didn’t want to offend or hurt people. When I was writing feature articles, often profiles of people, I found that my subjects would sometimes get upset. It wasn’t that I was distorting the record. It might have been that I was recounting things that others said about my subjects, or that I’d observed, and that they didn’t particularly want to see in print. Or that my perception of who these people were didn’t match their own. In any event, I thought writing fiction would be safer.

But I’ve come to think that when you’re basing your fiction on real people, it’s actually more dangerous. Writers of fiction feel they have the freedom to invent—and rightly so. But the people who think you’re writing about them can easily mistake your inventions for revelations of how you really feel about them. Not to mention that readers with only limited knowledge of a situation (like, say, acquaintances of Thomas Mann’s wife) may have no way of distinguishing what’s true from what’s invented.

In his Times piece, Toibin seems to be saying that he has no choice but to fictionalize events and people from his own life if he’s going to write good fiction: “If I made up a mother and put her in another town, a town I had never seen, I wouldn’t bother working at all. I would turn to drink, or just sit at home, or run for election.” (An interesting choice, that last one.) But this makes no sense to me. I confess I haven’t read any of Toibin’s fiction yet, but one of his books, The Master, is sitting next to my bed. It’s a fictionalization not of Toibin’s own life, but of the life of Henry James. And since it’s received a good deal of critical acclaim, I assume Toibin was successful at imagining all sorts of things he’d never actually seen or experienced.

Having written one historical novel and being in the midst of writing another, I’m also familiar with the process of inventing scenes and characters that have no relationship to my own lived experience—except in the sense that all writing is related to an author’s own experience. You’re always drawing on your thoughts, your emotions, your memories, in creating fiction. But it’s a question of degree. No one has ever gotten mad at me because they thought I put them into my historical novel.

Obviously, I’m not saying that writers need to limit themselves to stories set in the distant past. I can see myself writing another contemporary novel, but if I do I think I’ll depart further from my own experience than I did with The Mother Daughter Show. And I’m not presuming to tell other writers what to do. Who knows how many wonderful novels would never have been written if writers were forced to limit themselves to non-autobiographical material? I’m just saying it’s not for me.

But I do think that if you’re going to write, say, a story that portrays your wife as having an incestuous relationship with her twin brother, the least you can do is feel a little bad about it.

I’ve just survived the Great DC Power Failure of 2012. Or perhaps I should say of late June and early July 2012, because before the year is out there may well be another.

In my case, the power failure wasn’t caused by the mammoth storm that swept through the area Friday night—or at least, not directly. Our house survived the storm intact—unlike my mother’s assisted living facility nearby, which lost power immediately and, despite being made a high priority, didn’t get it back again until Monday morning.

No, we were among the lucky few who were spared by the capricious hand of nature. But then we were struck by the capricious hand of PEPCO, our much reviled local power company. Two days after the storm, on a cloudless, windless (and boiling hot) Sunday afternoon, our power started maddeningly flickering on and off, causing various appliances to beep and squeak and then go still. At one point I timed the outages, which lasted perhaps 30 seconds each, and they were about five minutes apart. If this had been labor, it would have been time to head to the hospital.

Each time the power went off we held our breath, waiting to see if it would come on again. And then, around 7:30 p.m., what we had been dreading all afternoon came to pass: the power stayed off.

Given the tight-lipped PR policy PEPCO maintains, we’ll probably never know why we and many of our neighbors lost power on Sunday. PEPCO moves, or fails to move, in mysterious ways. But whatever the cause, the loss of power—which for us lasted only a little over 24 hours—served to remind me of the vast differences between the era I live in and the year 1807, which is the year in which my novel-in-progress is set.

Yes—as my daughter kept reminding me when I was moaning about the heat and the inconvenience—people lived for centuries without electricity, and survived. But of course, in 1807, no one expected electricity. Their lives were organized around the lack of it. Ours aren’t.

For example, I had intended to devote the past two days to working on the first draft of my novel. I seem to be on the home stretch, and I feel some urgency about moving as fast as possible towards the end, basically so I can see what I need to go back and rewrite, once I know what the story is and who the characters are.

Back in 1807, all I would have had to do is sit down at a desk, pick up my quill pen, and start writing. But now, my draft and all my notes—including the PDF of an actual magazine from 1807 on which I’m relying for much of my material—were locked away in my computer, inaccessible without electricity. (My daughter, on the other hand, went off to work on Monday morning, at an office with all its modern conveniences still working.)

Plus, it was basically too hot to work. Yes, it got hot back in 1807 too, and needless to say there was no air conditioning to provide relief. And yes, they had to wear more clothing then than we do now—especially the men (the new Empire fashions for women were scandalous but no doubt considerably cooler than what preceded and followed them). But I have to wonder if global warming hasn’t driven up the temperatures quite a bit in the past 200 years. And you don’t miss what you’ve never known. Perhaps if the concept of air conditioning were completely foreign to me, I would have just rolled up my sleeves and gotten on with the task (assuming I could get to my draft and my notes). But it wasn’t, and I couldn’t.

So here I was, surrounded by all the things that usually make life easier and now, rendered useless by the power outage, seemed to be making everything harder. The dirty dishes were in the dishwasher, trapped in mid-cycle. The laundry, which I had been on the verge of sticking into the washing machine, overflowed the hamper. And the food in our refrigerator and freezer was getting inexorably warmer.

Back in 1807, people presumably had to go to the market to buy food pretty much every day. If you were wealthy you might have an ice house on your property, and you could always try salting or brining things to preserve them, but basically you had to eat perishables like meat pretty quickly, especially in the summer. If there were leftovers after a meal, you would eat them for the next meal, because otherwise they’d go to waste.

Some people in DC who lost power started frantically eating whatever was in their refrigerators, on the same principle. I gorged on some peaches that were fast giving themselves over to mold, but I couldn’t quite face opening the refrigerator. So I spent this morning throwing out food. It was painful to send a dozen eggs and an unopened half gallon of milk down the drain. On the other hand, I was amazed at the number of things in my refrigerator that really had no right to be there—odd condiments and exotic salsas, for example, that looked enticing when I bought them, years ago, but somehow never seemed to go with what I was making. Why on earth did I have two bottles of Worcestershire sauce, which I hardly ever use? And why did one of them have an expiration date of 2004?

I went to the supermarket to replace what I’d thrown out, but I was amazed to discover how little I actually needed to buy, and how empty my refrigerator looks now. (And how clean—once I got rid of what was on the shelves, it became apparent that the shelves themselves were in serious need of hygienic attention.) No doubt eventually there will be another accretion of stuff I basically don’t need, which will languish in the fridge at least until the next power outage, but I’m going to try to adhere a little more closely to the 1807 modus vivendi, at least in this respect: only buy what you’re actually going to eat.

And now that my computer is up and working again, I can use it to mentally transport myself back to a world that knew nothing of iPhones and e-readers, a world of quill pens and candlelight. It’s a nice place to visit, but I know I’d have a tough time living there.

Knowing that Mother’s Day is just around the corner—and bearing in mind the fact that I published a novel about mother-daughter relationships not long ago—I thought it would be appropriate to say a few words about my mother.

How do you say just a few words about the person who gave you life, who sacrificed her sleep to soothe your infant tears, who nursed you through your childhood illnesses, who beamed proudly at your adolescent successes? Well, you choose your words carefully.

I suppose each of us could say we wouldn’t be here without our mothers, but in my case that’s particularly true. My father was adamantly opposed, on principle, to the very idea of having children. His view was that this was a terrible world, and it was immoral to bring more human beings into it. When he and my mother (who was, of course, not yet my mother) were first getting to know each other, and my mother casually mentioned that she planned on having children someday, his response was, “And I thought you were an intelligent woman!”

My mother married him nonetheless, and remained intent on having children. So intent, in fact, that she threatened to leave my father unless he at least temporarily relaxed his opposition to human procreation. Eventually he agreed, and so I came into the world (at which point, I might add, my father did a 180-degree turnaround on the wisdom of having babies, at least in my case).

I recently reminded my mother of all this when she began to thank me effusively, as she often does, for some trivial task I had performed for her—going through her junk mail, perhaps, or taking her to a dentist appointment. As I keep telling her, what I’m doing for her these days is nothing compared to what she once did for me.

She didn’t stop at insisting that I be conceived. She threw herself into my upbringing with a vengeance. (My father’s original policy on procreation was reinstated after my birth, so I remained an only child and the sole object of maternal attention.) I don’t remember much of my early childhood, of course, but to hear my mother describe it I was a tiny genius and a paragon of infant behavior (aside from my chronic distaste for sleep). I have a feeling this reflects more on my mother’s enthusiasm for me than on any actual qualities I displayed.

One thing I do remember is how my mother taught me to read. Convinced that I was a prodigy, she saw no reason to delay my initiation into the world of letters until I started first grade, as was the norm. (In the 1950’s preschool basically consisted of playing with blocks and Play-Doh, with little or none of the reading readiness curriculum that’s deployed on four-year-olds nowadays.)

Like many young children, I loved to make up stories. My mother seized on this as a way to get me to read. An adept stenographer, she would take down the stories in shorthand as I spun them out—making me perhaps the only four-year-old in history to give dictation. Then she would type them up and hand them back to me, knowing that, with the natural egotism of a child, I would be thrilled to see them in print and desperate to read them.

It’s possible I would have become an early reader anyway, since reading was the primary recreational activity in my family. I grew up in apartments where the walls were lined with books and just about every surface was piled with newspapers and magazines. We would eat dinner behind separate barriers of reading material (we had bookstands specially bought for this purpose), occasionally punctuating the meal with remarks about something thought-provoking we’d just come across. None of us ever left the house without a book or at least a few New Yorkers—something to get us through a long bus ride, or even a surprise eight-hour stint in a stuck elevator. You never know.

But if my mother didn’t single-handedly turn me into a reader, she may well have helped turn me into a writer. It took me a while to get back to the point where I was at the age of four, uninhibitedly making up stories. And it turns out that writing a novel is a lot more complicated and time-consuming than dictating fables off the top of my head. But it was my mother’s rapid-fire stenography—those mysterious chicken scratches, an alphabet I never mastered—and her devoted typing that first gave me the idea that the stuff I made up could be of interest to others, and that it could be immortalized on paper.

So thanks, Mom, for giving me the first of what would turn out to be many thrills at seeing my own words in print. Not to mention for being the most enthusiastic audience any writer could ever hope for.