So that’s another one off my bucket list: joining a book club. (That’s me, living on the edge, right?) For our first meeting the book to read was John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars.

Green is an American, young adult, fiction author who is a superstar in his own country and elsewhere around the world, but who is only just starting to make waves in Europe.

Opening his latest novel, The Fault In Our Stars (good read, by the way, if you like melancholy and funny, but especially tear-jerking), I came across this disclaimer on the very first page:

“Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species. I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.”

Reading this disclaimer fascinated me, because on the one hand most of the authors I know and work with would gladly engrave those words in giant font above their desks. On the other hand, countless book club and online conversations have been fuelled,well, by wine of course; but also by the perennial question “Just how much of that book is based on the author’s life?”, or case-specific variants such as “Is that narcissistic, life-sapping bitch in the novel based on his ex-wife?”

Famous examples abound: Hanif Kureishi’s breakout hit, The Buddha of Suburbia, caused a well-publicised rift with his own father, who felt humiliated by Kureishi Jr’s depiction of the protagonist’s father in the novel.

We have all done it, at some point, reading a novel and thinking that the author must have lived some similar experience

We have all done it, at some point, reading a novel and thinking that the author must have lived some similar experience for him to be able to write so vividly about such an emotion or situation.

This is even trickier in the context of tiny Malta’s body of literature. Let’s face it, chances are we either know the author or at the very least know someone who knows someone who’s heard some juicy gossip about them.

Authors, on the other hand, tend to distance themselves from these inferences of experience. Their characters and situations are so well-rounded and believable, one could argue, because a good writer’s talent lies also in their ability to make up stories and pull us right into them.

That is precisely why they are writers, while you and I are not. The obvious example, I suppose, would be murder mysteries, where one does not – one hopes – have to have committed a murder to give readers a keen insight into the mental process.

The late Iain Banks built a veritable museum of criminal deviance and ferocity with the characters of a few of his novels – chief among which Complicity, with its depictions of a sadistic serial killer’s modus operandi – and no one, to my knowledge, ever took that to mean Scotland Yard should lock him up.

Yet, no matter how insistently authors deny it, or try to pre-empt it, as Green does in his above-quoted preface, readers will keep on seeking insights between the lines into authors’ thoughts and experiences.

We are all, to varying degrees, fascinated by the lives of others, and literature offers a unique opportunity to explore a writer’s innermost thoughts, exposed in black on white for everyone to see.

Call it literary voyeurism, if you will.