Fiction about real people is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the author is free to use their imagination to take the reader behind the scenes or into the private moments of public figures, creating a picture of them unavailable to historians bound to stick to the record. If done judiciously it can be humanizing. But if done haphazardly, these inventions can needlessly cause confusion if readers take the book as fact. The Original is a novel about Katharine Hepburn’s early Hollywood career, beginning […]