Life Making Trouble for Fiction: Leslie Daniels 

"Last week, here and in the Times Literary Supplement, was announced the discovery of a story by Vladimir Nabokov on boxing...On the same day my doorbell rang, and on the threshold stood a man who had grown up in my house. His parents, the builders of this mid-century wooden house, once rented to Vladimir Nabokov, then a professor at Cornell University. ...Last year my first novel came out, Cleaning Nabokov's House--which is not actually about housecleaning, no matter what Twitter insists. ...Those three facts are true. As a fiction writer, I am frequently asked how much of my work is true. All fiction writers get this question, but I get it with particular vehemence. This makes me happy; I worked hard to make something absurd seem true, and there it is: proof the reader was persuaded, even seduced [snip ] ... the Nabokovs were contentious tenants, complaining about the house. The homeowners were away on a sabbatical in Paris, and had never met Vera and Vladimir Nabokov. His mother resented their complaints.."
 

 

Life Making Trouble for Fiction
Huffington Post
The homeowners were away on a sabbatical in Paris, and had never met Vera and Vladimir Nabokov. His mother resented their complaints. When she returned from Paris to find notes of Nabokov's in the house--and she has taken lifelong delight in telling ...
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