Margaret Forster is a biographer and novelist, and in Diary of an Ordinary Woman she merges the two forms.

Presented as the edited diary of Millicent King, born in 1901, the book is, in fact, Forster’s invention. An author’s note explains that, having been promised the diaries of a real-life ‘Millicent’ that never materialised, Forster decided “to overcome my disappointment by pretending I had indeed obtained and read them. The result is fiction.”

The book’s many reviewers obsess over the inherent ‘truth’ within:

“This is fiction, yet it is true” (Guardian);

“It may be fiction, but it’s also - convincingly, tragically and often exhilaratingly - real life” (Independent on Sunday).

Despite confessing to be ‘just’ a novel, the truth it conveys makes its readers want to describe it as something else. Perhaps the conventional division of fact/fiction is not, after all, as useful as it seems.