Comment by TheOtherHobbes

"Based on a true story."

It's not fiction. It's taking the personal relationship of two people and editorialising it to turn it into something it wasn't - for personal gain and political status - while causing the people in it genuine pain and grief.

It's a form of appropriation. If it was mostly fictional it could have started from a different premise and used different characters.

The character space that authors can work in is unimaginably vast, and there was no need at all to use personal experiences to "borrow" detail when some imagined experiences would have done the job just as well.

In reality the the impact of the story comes from the people it's based on - not from the creative imagination of the author, who took their private lives and feelings and distorted them into a saleable feminist parable.