What Novelists Do?

 Probably a bad title but I wanted to note this passage from Laura Lippman writing about Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound on The Crime Reads site.

Joan Didion famously wrote: Writers are always selling someone out. I have come to the conclusion that, yes, I am always selling someone out, and it is myself. In my novels, I lay bare my obsessions and my pettiness. I plumb my characters—not just Gerry, in the case of Dream Girl, but his feckless ex, his stolid night nurse, his incurious assistant—trying to figure out who I am and what I want.

I want to remember that as I work my way back to my own fiction.