artifice
Many of his readers, having been “educated” by Flaubert and other modern novelists, knew that autobiography was a form of fiction and that a confessional writer could never be taken at his word. But artifice is also a means of self-discovery. Even in its skillful distortions of biographical fact, Afloat is a voyage into the writer’s mind.
—from the NYRB review of a recent reissue of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Afloat.
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