According to Paul Quinn (in the TLS), Alexander Theroux’s 700-page Darconville’s Cat was a product of jilted love. “Do your worst,” she had said when Theroux threatened to expose her in fiction, and he did: Theroux “encrypted his former lover’s name in acrostics and anagrams, and even cited her as the author of the spoof books whose titles are scattered through the novel, which relentlessly pursues its object through a number of literary modes and rhetorical figures.”

The lesson: Don’t make a novelist mad. Or maybe the lesson is: Do.