Keziah Weir Isn’t Writing About You
Ask Keziah Weir if her fiction draws from her life, and she’ll demur. She likes inventing characters and disappearing into imagined worlds, not writing autofiction. Yet her debut novel The Mythmakers begins with a character, journalist Sal Cannon, recognizing herself in a short story written by an acquaintance, Martin Keller, a novelist who never received much acclaim. Sal becomes desperate to read the manuscript the story was excerpted from, and in the process embeds herself in the life of Martin’s widow, Moira.
On the heels of stories like “Cat Person’ and Me” and “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”, which sparked conversations on the ethics of pulling details from people’s real lives in short fiction, Weir’s The Mythmakers grapples with questions about who owns a story and who has the right to tell it.
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