A really strange thing happened to me on Thursday night. I was having a drink at a local bar (the excellent gastropub The York in Highland Park), enjoying some fish and chips and a pint of Stone Pale Ale. At some point, I glanced over at the table to my right, where I saw a pretty woman having dinner with a couple of guys. I was certain I knew this woman from somewhere, but I couldn’t say where. Did I go to college with her? Did we once work together? Was she an actress (This is LA, after all)?
After a few minutes, it occured to me who it was. It was Genevieve Latko-Devine. I went back to eating my meal, content that I’d figured out who the mystery woman was. Except that I clearly hadn’t. Genevieve Latko-Devine is a character in Joshua Ferris’ book Then We Came to the End, about which I’ve posted before. I had “recognized” a character from a novel, a novel that hasn’t been adapted for the screen (Though if they’re planning an adaptation, they need to find this woman). It was the oddest feeling, seeing a person who so perfectly fits your idea of what a fictional character looks like.
I frequently get halfway through a book before realizing that I’ve been picturing the house in the story as a house I knew when I was a kid. Usually not my own house, but a house that I spent a lot of time in as a child. I’ve never been able to figure out the exact process that, as a reader, that makes the house in the book correspond to the house in my head. I don’t think it has to do with a description, though. I doubt the author has the same image of the house as I do, but nevertheless, it persists. But never have I seen a person who so clearly jumped out at me as a character (especially a relatively minor character like Genevieve Latko-Devine).
Has this ever happened to anyone else? Have you ever seen a character from a book in the real world?
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That phenomenon doesn’t happen to me, but I DO often find myself about to say “Oh, I know someone who lives there,” or “That happened to a friend of mine!” etc, only to realize that the friend I am thinking of happens to be a fictional character.
Yes, Emma, that happened to Patrick and me once. We were like, “Who is that friend of ours who likes to put ice cream in his coffee, to cheer him up?” We realized it was a character from The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter.
Sometimes I see characters from the novel I’m writing in the real world. I recently I saw two girls laughing in the wind, hanging onto the Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz–they were two girls from my book, I was sure of it. I felt really, really strange. Maybe I’m not writing fiction after all.
I always see Aragorn when I travel in Northern India. My main character (the model who posed for the cover of two of my books) tracked me down on Facebook. It was an eerie sensation seeing her extremely familiar face requesting my friendship.
Sort of related. How about being in a bookstore and overhearing readers gossip about a fictional character in a book that was loosely based on you?