Fundamentally Fiction

"This entire book is filtered through the consciousness of [the] main character. I don't want to give too much away here, but hopefully, as one reads through it, that becomes clearer and clearer. It might seem as if it's being told from a separate narrator, but it's supposed to be coming through her consciousness in a way. And a lot of what is possibly seen here as being real  or experienced is partly her imagings of what other people are going through. Which is fundamentally how we all live our lives anyway.

We all imagine things about people, what their lives are like. And we operate as if these imaginings and ideas are real, but they're not. They're fundamentally fiction. Even the things we know about the people we care about most or we live with — stories they tell us about their childhood. We think we understand them, but those images and those stories, they're not true necessarily. They might have moments, pieces and facts and things, but what's in our brains — they're constructs."

~ Chris Ware, speaking about his book, Building Stories, with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm, November 8, 2012