Quote of the Day (Heidi Julavits, on Historical Fiction)

“I believe it is a mistake to look to historical literary fiction if readers want to learn about history, because numerical and factual accuracy has always possessed a limited ability to tell the truth. On the flip side, this historical novelist would be foolhardy to overlook the reader’s inherent distrust of her undertaking, and should wisely limit the number of occasions for doubt. My prickly resistance to this ‘fact,’ however, is that it obscures the real challenge faced by the historical novelist. The real challenge of writing a historical literary novel is not to make your novel seem to be taking place in 1934; the challenge is to make it seem as if the story could have happened last year, or 10 years from now. Perhaps the historical literary novel would be better served by a new name: the mythic novel. This more permissive genre would seamlessly combine backward-glancing and utter fabrication, resulting in a timeless fictional truth."—American novelist, editor, and academic Heidi Julavits, “The Literary Life: Fiction 21c: History as an Occasion for Literature,” Poets and Writers, January/February 2002

The image accompanying this post, of Heidi Julavits at the 2015 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, was taken Oct. 17, 2015, by Larry D. Moore.