Roman à clef is a form of fiction I’ve always enjoyed reading, from Primary Colors to The Devil Wears Prada). Encyclopaedia Britannica defines roman à clef like this: (French: “novel with a key”) novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters.

In The Widow of Wall Street, I used Bernie Madoff’s explosive Ponzi scheme as the spine which I wrapped with fiction. Writing this gave me the freedom to explore how and why this man’s wife became vilified, even while she was another of his victims.

American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld, lit my roman a clef fire. I’ve read this book, which rings of Laura Bush, twice and listened to the audiobook. I admire the heck out of Sittenfeld’s work:

“This latest novel succeeds in creating a memorable and sympathetic heroine….Allowing Alice to tell the story of her life in her own words, Ms. Sittenfeld does a nimble job of describing the chemistry that brought the Blackwells together. She not only conjures the physical electricity they shared but also captures the immediate ease they felt in each other’s presence: their ability to make each other laugh, their delight in spending time together, the happy meshing of their very different personalities: her introspection and good-girl caution grounding his boyish exuberance; his confidence and love of fun giving her a new sense of life’s possibilities.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Young Jane: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin takes an imagined behind the scenes of a situation like Monica Lewinsky scandal, with sympathy and a ton of ‘what if.” “It’s brilliant and hilarious, and it makes you wince in recognition — for the double-standard that relegates scandalized women to a life of shame even as their married lovers continue with their careers (and often their marriages), for the insatiable appetite we have for every last detail, for the ease and speed with which we stop seeing people as multilayered humans. It’s the sort of book that invites us to examine our long-held beliefs and perceptions . . . It has a heart. And a spine. It’s exactly, I would argue, what we need more of right now.”—Chicago Tribune

The Senator’s Children by Nicholas Montemarano touched the place in me that knows about the collateral damage secrets and lies cause in a family. In Montemarano’s book, we see how deeply the children of this imagined senator running for president are affected by his hidden, and then not hidden, affair.

“Much the way Curtis Sittenfeld dug deep into the psyche of a fictionalized version of Laura Bush, in her great novel American Wife, so Montemarano has humanized the [John] Edwards story, allowing us to look far inside at people who had seemed merely to be supporting actors in the larger drama…It’s hard to look so deeply into other people’s lives that you really understand them, except perhaps through fiction, and that is what Montemarano has done here, with deftness and subtlety.”—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times