"[Pauls] Toutonghi wrote both books in the first person. And yet, he considers this less than a complete success: ‘I was reading Dickens,’ he wrote in a recent essay for Salon, ‘who kept himself away from the page…and I can’t help wondering if anything is lost in the frank disclosures of our modern, first-person, memoir-driven fiction.’

This is perhaps the greatest hang-up of the modern novelist — that fiction is somehow unsophisticated or inherently cliché if it is rooted in the writer’s own life, and that writers should be creative enough to invent entirely new worlds and find drama only in the unfamiliar."