Factual fiction

"Our modern world is […] one of constant fragmentation and mixing of genres and lifestyles. The narratives of the traditional “life-story” are breaking down into unrelated pieces. We work 40 jobs over a lifetime, we have 50 sexual partners, we move location and we start again and again in the deregulated, privatised world of self-selling. We inhabit virtual places as much as we do real ones. Facts become blurred and we live out fictions. For works of writing to reflect this world, they also have to enter into the language and forms of our time, otherwise we end up with confused, over-stuffed, compromised books that use an old form to try to talk about a new time.
Whether we like it or not, the net is rewiring our reading habits. As Benjamin said, the novel, as it exists, cannot contain the threat from the form that is greater than it: information. If it is to be relevant at all, the novel must break into new hybrids and leave the 19th-century segregation of fact, fiction, memoir and essay behind. The novel must let the world in and speak through the many forms that the world already speaks through."

Ewan Morrison, in The Guardian, 2 March 2012