In other words, while fictitious, the storylines of such novels find their complications in the artistic, social, and professional circumstances of the ‘writerly’ aspect of the narrator’s life. Which can cause the reader to forget that the work does not posit itself as a recounting of actual events, and of things that could be said to have ‘happened,’ but as made-up, imagined, or, as John Gardner would put it, as a “vivid and continuous dream.”