What is "real?" The author of The Professor's Daughter spends a lot of time explaining that her novel isn't autobiography.

A month before my novel was to be published, my publicist told me she had an uncomfortable question she needed me to answer. I braced myself. She wanted to know if my grandfather had really been lynched. I bristled. "I'd rather not answer that," I said.

Apparently, a book reviewer from a glossy women's magazine wanted to know. She liked my writing, the review would be positive and the exposure would be good for sales. But I still resisted her question. I felt that it was none of her business. If the reviewer liked my book, why did it matter whether or not it was true?

Delicately, my publicist suggested that I think long and hard about how to address the personal questions that were bound to arise in interviews and at the readings on my upcoming book tour. "People will want to know how much of your work is autobiographical," she warned.

I considered her advice from the perspective of the reader and realized I'm guilty of the same crime. That is, I enjoy knowing how authors' lives intersect with the lives of their characters. For example, a novel that takes place in the arctic wilds of Alaska feels more authentic to me if I know that the writer is an Eskimo. I also often flip to the back flap of a book, scrutinize the author photo and shamelessly substitute that face for the face of the protagonist. And when a novel really grabs me, I sometimes even forget that it's fiction and experience it as truth.

The Ambiguity of Race

My book is not a memoir, but it does draw heavily from my life experience. I began writing it when I was very young, too young to know how to write about anything else. It's not hard to see why a reader might mistake the main character for me. Her name resembles mine, she grew up in the town I grew up in, she's biracial as I am, and her father, like my own, is an Ivy League professor.

The Professor's Daughter is in part about a racially ambiguous young woman's search to belong in our racially stratified society. I told this story because it wasn't there for me when I needed to read it. I wanted to answer and undermine a question that has always plagued me: "What are you?" People want to know why I look the way I do, and the answer that satisfies them best is only skin deep. "My father is black and my mother is white," I answer, knowing what they want to hear.

That answer has never satisfied me. What I look like is the least important thing about me because it does not explain my character. What 1 am has little to do with my wavy hair and olive skin and everything to do with where I grew up, how I was raised, what events shaped my thinking, my faith, my community, my education, my hopes, my fears, my sexuality, my pride, my politics, my secrets, my rage, how I choose to behave, whom I have chosen to love, who I am loved by, my family, my family's history, our national history and my place within it. These strands comprise the DNA of my character.

I knew that a serious answer to the lazy question, "What are you?" would take years. So that's what I did. I took a few years to comb and braid those strands into a book.

Where Fiction Takes Over

Something miraculous happened while I was writing, I stopped thinking of the main character as being me. She was still my mouthpiece, and she felt and did things I've done. But I manipulated her to do things I hadn't. At some point, I grew tired of her limited perspective and realized that the story I had to tell was much larger than she was. It was a national story that started before she was born. It was her father's story, and his father's.

Her father stopped being my father. I imagined him as a little boy in Mississippi growing up under Jim Crow. He was an orphan whose father had been lynched. He was real to me, I cared about him like he was my son, but as I wrote his story I took huge imaginative leaps. I had to. I wasn't there.

In my book, the lynching is a dark family secret, too ugly to pass on. I brought it to light to honor our past. I didn't know how to write about something as insidious as a lynching without diminishing its horror, so I went at it sideways, like describing the ripples in a pond rather than the stone that created them. Rather than writing about it directly, I concentrated on the crippling psychological effects the lynching had on the generations that followed, and the stultifying grip racism has on us, still.

My publicist was right. Readers assume that the story I wrote is the story of my life; and they are not entirely mistaken. I wanted to make my story public. Still, I am protective of my family and my private self. So when people ask me if this really happened, I reply, "Did it feel like it did?"

And when they answer, yes, I can say with satisfaction, "Good. Then I did my job."

Emily Raboteau, author of The Professor's Daughter, is an English professor in Harlem at the City College of New York.

The Professor's Daughter (Henry Holt and Company, February 2005, $24, ISBN 0-805-07506-2)