Finding Yourself in a Book

I mentioned last month how Elie Wiesel is linked to my family because my great-grandmother and her siblings came from the same town. When he wrote about his neighbours in Night, he was writing (possibly) about my great-great-aunts and uncles. It makes me feel close to them when I read that book.

Longreads had a piece recently about a grandson proving that his grandfather was the inspiration (and his war stories reproduced) for the character John Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The two men knew each other; were friends during the war, serving on the same base. He would go on a mission, come back to the base, and share the stories with Joseph Heller who turned them into the backbone of his famous novel. So people sort of knew his grandfather without knowing they knew his grandfather.

This isn’t special in the sense that authors base characters on real people all the time. In the same way that it’s hard (impossible?) to imagine a face you’ve never seen, it’s hard (impossible?) to create a fictional character that is not based on any living human. You borrow someone’s bravery and some else’s wit and you change the details in a fantastic story you once heard and use it as a plot point. Or you borrow from your own life. I cannot tell you how many actual moments from my life were fictionalized and added to my books.

Obviously the type of character matters: no one wants to find out their ancestor was the inspiration for Voldemort, but I would love to find myself in a book one day.

Would you want to find out you were fictionalized in someone’s book?