Room: A Stolen Story or a Masterpiece? - Comments

Dude, I don't like authors writing people life stories when they haven't lived it.
But, I'm thinking they didn't go into the whole thing and yet I still wouldn't read it - life is sad enough without reading depressing things. xD

If you honestly think that Fritzl's case is the first case of someone being held for years away from civilization, then you're mistaken and if you think the Room is the first fictional piece to explore it, you'd also be wrong. Look up stories of feral children. The cases have occurred more often than we like to admit. Look up the short story 'Those Who Walk Away From Omelas'. Stories about abuse and mistreatment of people are not meant to be there to degrade the people that it actually happened to and the cases they're inspired by.

If you are telling me that artists can't and shouldn't make money off of things they experience in real life (first hand or second hand) then you probably take a long hard look at the world around you. Look at most horror movies. Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs. What do all of these movies have in common? If you don't realize it, it's the fact that all of those movies used very specific details about the serial killer Ed Gein in forming the characters. Using details doesn't make someone a thief. Taking someone's entire life makes them a thief but let's face it. When you take aspects of REAL LIFE and the REAL WORLD, that wonderful and horrific, magical and preposterous world of ours, and put it into your work? It makes it more real. It makes it tangible. It's what makes those horrifying stories even more horrifying because they didn't make it up. Because it is possible and it's not just something you can ignore and push away and say, 'That would never happen'.

Oh and if Fritzl is really annoyed by that ONE detail being taken directly from her case, she can take a leaf out of America's playbook and sue the ever loving crap out of that writer.

Thank you, White Russian Doll :).

asteroid.: I will paraphrase a quote from the review: A story inspired by Fritzl’s case would have been okay, for example a story of a person kidnapped and trapped in a room. It’s the little things that made the difference for me.
I meant that while being influenced by the Fritzl case was okay, Donoghue used the personal things like cutting off the power from Fritzl’s actual life (there are a few others, I just chose to focus on that one as it stuck out to me most). For example, writing fiction about the Holocaust is acceptable but if you chose a specific person and their own personal experiences in it and make a work of fiction (not non-fiction) I, personally, find it derogatory. It’s mostly a matter of personal opinion and where you draw the line at an author creating their own profits from it. Some people would be okay with authors using private information like that and others would say using Fritzl’s life in her father’s basement at all, in any way, is wrong.
But thank you for commenting :)

What I'm getting from this is that no book should ever draw from something that really happened...

I haven't read this book and, to be honest, I don't think I could. But I still find this review really interesting. You've raised some really important issues, like the fact that Donoghue is, in effect, making money from Elizabeth Fritzl's tragic case. Very well written. (:

I loved that book. :)