Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. As a reporter, there is something I find

frustrating about auto fiction, and it's that if I'm using the book to ask a question about

this aspect of your life or that aspect, the writer can at any point kind of cop out and say,

oh, that part's fiction, that part's made up. Of course,

it isn't a writer's job to pander to nosy reporters like me, but there's a moment like this that

happens in this interview between NPR's R. Shapiro and the novelist Claire Massoud, whose book

This Strange Eventful History tracks closely with the history of Massoud's own family.

And when Ari asks about, oh, what does it like to have the world know so much about your grandparents,

Claire Massoud does the, oh, it's just fiction thing.

But then she follows it up with an explanation of not just what writing is, but what reading is.

That's so thoughtful, I can't be mad at it.

That's ahead.

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Although Claire Messoud is a celebrated novelist, she is not the first writer in her family.

Her grandfather wrote a book by hand, in French, that ran well over a thousand pages.

It was part memoir, part scrapbook, and it became a sort of family heirloom.

It is a remarkable collection of documents,

because it also includes photographs and telegrams and letters and so on. And I didn't read it

in its entirety until I was on leave from teaching in 2017. So he wrote it in the 1970s,

...