By Katherine Rosman, Aug 20, 2017<\/p>\n
In a new novel called \u201cImagining Diana,\u201d readers find Princess Diana having lunch in Midtown Manhattan at Michael\u2019s, nodding hello to Barbara Walters on her way in, dressed in an Oscar de la Renta suit, sitting at Table 1, ordering the gravlax.<\/p>\n
Her date is Lois Shadley: a loudmouthed, four-Splendas-in-her-iced-tea literary agent who is pushing Diana to write a memoir, one that wouldn\u2019t just be about the do-gooder stuff. One that would dish about the aftermath of the accident and whether it was true that her post-divorce friendship with Prince Charles was driving Camilla batty with jealousy. \u201cI mean what I think would feel fresh<\/em> \u2014 really come alive<\/em> \u2014 is that this should begin on that terrible night in Paris,\u201d the agent yapped.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted it to be true and to reflect how complex a person she was,\u201d said Diane Clehane, the author of the novel published by Metabook<\/a> to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Diana\u2019s death and containing scenes such as those above. \u201cI wasn\u2019t interested in doing anything that was cheesy or tawdry.\u201d<\/p>\n The novel imagines that Diana survived the car accident in Paris that killed her on Aug. 31, 1997<\/a>, and then tells of the princess\u2019s efforts to rebuild her life. \u201cSince her death, she has become even more fascinating,\u201d said Ms. Clehane, earlier this week, sitting at Table 1 at Michael\u2019s (from which she reports a frequent column called \u201cLunch\u201d in Adweek<\/a>), over a plate of chicken paillard and kale.<\/p>\n But back to our fairy tale: Diana, by then the stateside \u201cPeople\u2019s Princess,\u201d travels abroad often for the Princess Diana Foundation, and to London often to see her sons. She presents the best documentary award at the Academy Awards to a film about land mines in Cambodia and Laos, and harmlessly flirts with a star-struck movie star at the Vanity Fair after-party.<\/p>\n When in Los Angeles, she stays at the Hotel Bel-Air. But mostly she lives with Teddy Forstmann at his Fifth Avenue apartment and Southampton estate. She has a diamond engagement ring (a tasteful nine carats), and the $100 million prenup is signed, sealed and delivered. Diana is ours, again, if only for 208 pages.<\/p>\n Diana was famous before the internet, famous before millions of iPhones began to capture every sneeze of every celebrity pushing her cart in a Whole Foods parking lot. To observe her, the public relied on paparazzi, magazines and newspapers of varying quality, and television. Biographers, including the longtime editor Tina Brown, have documented how Diana tried to shape all this coverage by making herself selectively available and self-revelatory.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was the first global celebrity because she was authentic,\u201d said Hilary Black, the editor of National Geographic\u2019s new book \u201cRemembering Diana: a Life in Photographs\u201d (whose foreword was written by Ms. Brown). \u201cOnce she realized she could master the media, she took a feminist stance and told her story the way she wanted to tell it.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in her day, that sometimes was called manipulating the press. Today it\u2019s called branding.<\/p>\n In our so-called curated, fake news era, it is perhaps inevitable that fact and fiction would begin to mingle in books, movies and television. \u201cThe best of fiction has always tried to get at truth where journalism cannot,\u201d said Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of the 2008 book \u201cAmerican Wife<\/a>,\u201d a novel that based the life of a fictional first lady on that of a real one, Laura Bush.<\/p>\n Ms. Sittenfeld is getting more practice at considering the conjoining of fact and fiction, ego and alter. Last year, Esquire commissioned her to write a short story from the voice and perspective of Hillary Clinton. In it, a fictional Mrs. Clinton reflects on her relationship with a fictional journalist who has covered her for years, at The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post and finally The New York Times.<\/p>\n \u201cI expect to be burned by the journalist,\u201d the Clinton character tells the reader. \u201cNo matter how friendly our encounter, how personal, even, I will at best be irritated by what she writes.\u201d<\/p>\n Once Ms. Sittenfeld got Hillary in her head, she couldn\u2019t easily dispense with her. Now she is at work on a novel that will portray the life of Hillary Rodham after she decides to reject Bill Clinton\u2019s final proposal of marriage.<\/p>\n Ms. Sittenfeld said she would not be interested in writing a novel that imagined that Mrs. Clinton was elected the 45th president of the United States. Despite the amount of press coverage devoted to Mrs. Clinton\u2019s career, Ms. Sittenfeld believes, what most Americans know about her relates to her marriage. Wiping that slate clear is what she finds compelling as a novelist. (She asked her social media audience to suggest titles for this book. Her favorite response came on Facebook: \u201cSliding Pantsuits.\u201d)<\/p>\n Some exercises in reconsidering history are not so lighthearted. Last month, HBO announced that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the creators of \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d would collaborate on a new project, \u201cConfederate<\/a>\u201d: a modern-day drama based on a premise that slavery persists in the South after its successful secession from the Union during the Civil War.<\/p>\n The reaction was scathing. \u201cThis show is the brainchild of two white men who oversee a show that has few people of color to speak of and where sexual violence is often gratuitous and treated as no big deal. I shudder to imagine the enslaved black body in their creative hands,\u201d Roxane Gay wrote in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n April Reign, a onetime attorney in Washington, D.C., and hashtag activist who created the #OscarsSoWhite<\/a> movement, joined with four others, including the film critic ReB<\/a>ecca Theodore<\/a>, to galvanize internet opposition to the proposed series, with the hashtag #NoConfederate<\/a>. \u201cI wonder what has become of originality and creativity,\u201d Ms. Reign said in a phone interview. \u201cWhy would we want to introduce more hypotheticals into a culture trying to grapple with what is fake and what is true? People are trying to force hypotheticals for their own profit.\u201d<\/p>\n Alternate reality, though gaining prevalence today, is hardly new. The 2015 Amazon series \u201cThe Man in the High Castle,\u201d based on a 1960s book, focuses on an America that has been divided into Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Pacific States after the Allies lose World War II. In the 2004 novel \u201cThe Plot Against America<\/a>,\u201d which The New Yorker called \u201ccounterfactual<\/a>,\u201d Philip Roth wrote of an America in which Charles Lindbergh, the Nazi sympathizer, is elected president in 1940.<\/p>\n The genre provides writers with a valuable literary device to contemplate our culture, Monica Ali, a novelist, said in an email. Ms. Ali is the author of \u201cUntold Story,<\/a>\u201d a 2011 book in which a princess, based on Diana, escapes her life in order to find ordinary pleasures in American suburban life.<\/p>\n \u201cNovels aren\u2019t \u2018fake,\u2019\u201d Ms. Ali wrote in the email. \u201cThey\u2019re fictional. Their purpose is not to deceive by making stuff up, it\u2019s to illuminate by reaching for truths (about human nature) that aren\u2019t about facts, but about the way we see the world and our place in it.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps there is an element of wish fulfillment as well, at least for Ms. Clehane. \u201cIt was cathartic,\u201d she said of writing \u201cImagining Diana,\u201d a process that led her to surround herself in homemade \u201cDiana mood boards\u201d and to watch every piece of Diana footage she could find. (Ms. Clehane also published a nonfiction book about the princess, in 1998, called \u201cDiana: The Secrets of her Style.\u201d)<\/p>\n With the new book, Ms. Clehane wanted to show that Diana would have found happiness and overcome her insecurities. \u201cI believe the love she felt for her sons would have pulled her back from whatever precipice she felt she was on,\u201d she said as her eyes welled with tears.<\/p>\n Ms. Clehane won\u2019t be denied her happy ending for Diana, even if Diana was.<\/p>\n