Allison Jones:
—I know you weren’t yourself when you did this, Hedy.
Hedra Carlson:
—I know, I was YOU.
In Single White Female Seeks Same, Allison Jones lets Hedy into her life, into a power struggle where Hedy begins to dress and act like Allison and finally tries to entirely possess and replace Allison, we the audience think “why doesn’t she see it coming?”
In ‘Based on a True Story’, Delphine de Vigan explores the themes of writer’s block, how does a writer move on from a success, and of the importance of truth in fiction in the modern day. The narrator of ‘Based on a True Story’ is called Delphine who has had a success with a book we can identify as de Vigan’s previous novel ‘Nothing Holds Back the Night’, thus set in the real. Through Delphine’s meeting with L a ghost writer she is able to present the arguments and counter arguments for basing fiction in the real, L explains that is what Delphine’s readers expect of her in these days where so much fiction is based on minor true news stories and we learn that in fact Delphine has been considering a subject based around reality television.
Faced with the choices between a fiction based on reality and a pure fiction Delphine is unable to write and as this situation persists L becomes more invasive, slowly building up the tension surrounding her, one day Delphine unearths a previous manuscript of her own and is invited for the first time to a dinner party at L’s where none of the other guests turn up:
L asked me to let her and her alone confidentially, read the unearthed manuscript, I promised.
Back at my place I pulled the curtains shut before turning the lights on, the possibility that L could have conceived and set up the whole masquerade with the single aim of softening me up came to my mind much later, I sat on my sofa and looked around me, I felt a strange feeling of relief and by contrast I suddenly understood what bothered me about L’s apartment: at her’s nothing was worn, yellowing, damaged, not a single object, piece of furniture or textile showed any traces of previous use.***
Soon after, L moves in “temporarily” with the weakened Delphine initially taking over her computer, her communications with the outside world and slowly her life, up to dressing like her and replacing her at literary events thus bringing to mind the initial quote from Single White Female.
The tension builds up to a crecendo when we realise that no one other than Delphine including her family, her partner or her friends have ever seen L. As de Vigan through Delphine then gives us another vision of the events and further argues between the need for fiction to be declared as having a tangible basis or not.
First Published in French as “D’après une histoire vraie” in 2015 by Lattès.
Translated into English by George Miller as “Based on a True Story” and published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2017
***My translation
South of Paris books 
I read this and thought it was good on some points, weaker on others.
It was my first de Vigan, I didn’t really know what to expect, I rather liked the unpicking of the story at the end, and found it an engaging way of presenting questions about writing
I’ve read three: the others were Nothing Holds Back the Night (the best of the three IMO) and Underground Time