"The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room." So says Jeanette Winterson, but thinking of Mary Novik's novel Muse, one might think the partition as thin as the pope's bedroom chamber curtain.
"In the lane, I had already lost a boot and fallen on my knees so that now my trousers were soaked and one of my socks was sodden and the bottoms of both my sleeves were freezing against my wrists." Harper Collins, 1990 This is Timothy Findley, writing
To begin, Annabel Lyon turns to books. You know you're in the hands of a writer who truly loves storytelling when that happens, right? Sure, she's making a point: "literary fiction is uniquely poised to perform an important ethical function in our lives -- namely to teach us compassion". But
Annabel Lyon says that she knew, almost immediately upon beginning to write The Golden Mean, that she would be writing the other half of its story. That was "a very male book...all male characters...about warfare and public life and politics and rationality [and] science, all the things that Aristotle represented".*
Who wouldn't fall for a guy with the "finest collection of books and manuscripts outside the Church in Europe"? Mind you, this is a time when a bookworm can't necessarily slip a bound volume into her purse or pocket. A work is as likely to be on a
