If a book is good, if it's artful, entertaining, and informative, should it matter who the author is? Once upon a time, many readers would have said no. It was a long-standing protocol of book appreciation to consider things like the gender, sexuality, ethnicity, personal vices, personal virtues (if any), and prior reputation of the author irrelevant to a book's merits. You could disapprove of a writer's politics and prejudices if they showed up in the text; otherwise, they were customarily bracketed off.
When people had an issue with the author, it was because they felt that he or she had violated what is known in narratology as the “autobiographical pact.” This is the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the “I,” of the text. The pact obviously governs our expectations about memoirs, but it extends in a more general way to books in which the speaker or the protagonist is presented as a fictionalized version of the author (so-called “autofiction”), and it extends even to straight-up fiction: if the name on the cover seriously misleads us about the identity of the author, we can feel we have been taken in.
There have always been writers who cheated on the pact. A case most people know is that of James Frey's 2003 memoir of recovery from addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine, “A Million Little Pieces.” The book was hugely popular, but it turned out to be partly fabricated, something Frey was forced to admit on television under the interrogation of Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen “A Million Little Pieces” for her book club and thereby made it a best-seller.
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