As DBC Pierre (a pseudonym) said of his novel, Lights Out in Wonderland, “It’s fiction, but it has a lot of fact in it.”

Fiction is a lawyer’s word for fact, although that same lawyer importunes me to expunge this exposé. In which case I deny everything. Much of Pianist Lost is true, but certain events have been rearranged to respect and shelter their origins.

DBC Pierre goes on to say, in a filmed interview at The Last Tuesday Society shop in Hackney, London, in August of 2010:

“It was unusual perhaps, the writing of this book, and it’s because… it’s about the world now made of up of the real and the unreal, and I wanted the book to be a similar mosaic. So a lot of things in the book, some of the most unexpected ones, are actually real…. The thing is really constructed the way the modern world is constructed, of things which are real and stories which are real, there are real stories and real events, but then there are some which aren’t, which entice you through the book and bring you to the next chapter….”

In my own case, I have invented P. Halstead and A. Brinkerhoff, and they have gratefully gotten together and erased me.

    – DB Adrian