Possibly the most frequently asked question of any author is: Is your book autobiographical? Different authors will answer this question differently, but in my case the answer is a resounding, “No.” Fiction to me is fiction and although I am constrained by the facts of the story, I am freed by its characters. I call it “Mythic-realism,” where events are consistent within the context of the story and yet the characters appear slightly brighter than in real life. Tadi, the indigenous native, is a point in fact. He appears to have powers of enlightenment and knowledge and yet nothing he does seems all that extraordinary. I, as author, have never met anyone like Tadi and yet I created him and gave him life.
At the beginning of the novel we find Katy in a broken state. She has left her field of genetic anthropology to write articles for Terrestrial magazine. But her depression keeps her secluded in her house and so her articles are culled off the internet and not by travel. That is representative of my work. I don’t have to travel to the Amazon to write about it. I don’t need to know a Katy to understand how she thinks. Fiction frees the writer from such restraints. As long as the author is true to their story, the story will be true to them.