“But there’s only one vessel that can ferry you past Laura’s moat, and that’s fiction. Ms. Sittenfeld has creatively applied her crayons to all the ambiguous blanks in the coloring book. It isn’t an invasion of privacy. Art has always been made out of the stories of kings and queens. Fictionalizing historical figures is fine. Fantasies about public figures are inevitable. The question of an ostensibly ordinary girl who lives through extraordinary things will always be gripping.”— Maureen Dowd, today in the NY Times

Maureen Dowd writes fictionalized stories about real people: it’s her genre. So perhaps it’s not surprising that she comments on Curtis Sittenfeld’s new book, “American Wife,” which is supposedly a fictionalized biography of our current First Lady, Laura Bush, in which Bush is figleafed as Alice Blackwell. I haven’t seen the book. However, the summaries on the author’s website (link above) show that Alice Blackwell’s fictional life is a close parallel of Bush’s real life.
If you are a public figure your recourse for much of what’s written about you is nonexistent. However, as we’ve recently been discussing here, there are some legal standards, and some of them even apply to fiction. I wonder if Sittenfeld’s “work of fictionalization” passes that standard.
But to claim, as MoDo does, that “creatively appl(ying) her crayons to all ambiguous blanks in the coloring book…isn’t an invasion of privacy” strikes me as wrong: isn’t making up what you want someone’s feeling to be and publicizing them—where the subject desired to remain private—the definition of invading their privacy? Let me take your life and make it publicly into something else. The alleged racy parts just make it even more distasteful. “Fictionalizing historical figures” may not be “fine”—and that’s an extremely broad statement. I hesitate to mention the obvious as well, but Laura Bush is not a “queen.” And make no mistake, this is no “ferry…past Laura’s moat.” This is a ferry past Sittenfeld’s moat, nothing more.

Note: Please keep your comments about Ms. Dowd to her professional writing here.