Historishically Thinking

The current The New Yorker there is a review (sub req) of a work of fiction the author of which once said

[i]creasingly, I am less interested in writing about fictional people because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story.

Her response to her lament was to write a work of fiction interlarded with "facts," we are supposed to believe.

I have said this before and I will say it again: if you don't want to write fiction don't but for god's sake stop pretending that fiction dedicated to factiness is somehow or another factual.

Were she really bored with fiction, instead of tired with all the hard work of making everything up, she could write, I don't know, a biography or a work of history. No really, I doubt, to be honest, that either would be any good as the discipline of either biography or history writing is rather different than the discipline required to write fiction but still.