One of last year’s bookish blockbusters is subject to a suit.  I haven’t read The Help by Kathyrn Stockett.  I know folks who have.  I’m waiting to get and read it for reasons I’ll bring up after I read it. 

But I read this article from a NYT blog.  An inviting quote into the piece’s scope is:

There are few topics in the South more complicated and fraught than the one between white families and black women who raise their children and keep their houses clean. The South, and high society in particular, is governed in large part by what is left unsaid, and this is particularly true on the topics of race and family.

This article has me thinking about the dangerous relationship between a writer’s resources for writing, on the one hand, and the responses of the people and situations which are those resources on the other.  I suppose I’m also spinning the words of this NYT post with Tuesday’s episode of The Good Wife (my current favorite show), along with having recently been forced by my wife to watch The Social Network.

That preface offered, fiction is fiction.  Made up.  Created.  From the imagination.  Or from some combination of the imagined and the real.  But it’s fiction, and that means that the literary display between the covers is accountable first to the author’s imagination.  The inimitable Richard Wright said that the writer should only bow to the monitor of his own imagination.  It’s difficult enough for a writer to be responsive to that vision.  When that vision–the result of sustained imagining–is tutored and decorated by real people and events, it’s get trickier.

Fiction is not only accountable to an author’s imagination.  It’s accountable, in ways that I suppose an audience has to detail, to the reader, to the people mentioned, even when those people are consumed inside the residence of a “work of fiction.”  Novels like The Help portray real people and real events, and writers are responsible to those folks and happenings.  In some way. 

Writers should take care in handling people, particularly writers of historical fiction.  And care is best evaluated by the people whose voices we use to tell our stories.  It’s evaluated by the people who are the subjects of our stories because those same folks are often subject to them.

So, my question, Would you suit if someone wrote a book about you, a novel about you?  If the writing wasn’t true or if the artistic expression crowded the way you perceived yourself before having paged through the published copy.  If the language was offensive or if the implicit ideas driving the story were disagreeable to some part of you.  What would you do?  How would you think?  Just a question.