The World inside Their Heads
A novelist wrestles with the idea that fiction is stranger than truth January | February 2019
Cultural appropriation wasn’t an issue in the 1980s when I published my first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World. It told the life story of Anna Swan, a nineteenth-century giantess who exhibited with P.T. Barnum (and who may be a distant relation of mine). Anna grew up in the backwoods of Nova Scotia before Barnum and his agent brought her to New York to exhibit at his American Museum on…