The book is fiction but everyone will assume it's a memoir

I already know what's coming. Someone's going to finish Inside the Mindset of a Shit Music Producer, message me, and ask "so which bits actually happened?". Although, granted, I will likely only check that email inbox once every quarter.

I get it though, I said It's semi-autobiographical. It's written under my real name. A lot of it is set in the London music world I've actually lived in; there are stints at a few big corporations that I worked for, and people I actually know show up in it, credited and all. If you know me even a little, you'll clock similarities. That's not an accident.

But it's a novel. I made a decision early on that it needed to be fiction, and I want to explain why, because I think it's more interesting than "changed the names to protect the innocent."

The truth needed room to be more true

Real life doesn't arrange itself neatly into a 32 chapter written story. The moments that actually mattered didn't happen in the right order, to the right people, at the right time to make a coherent narrative. If I'd written it as memoir, I'd have been stuck reporting events in the sequence they happened, and that would have taken an incredibly big printer to be able to print that book.

Fiction let me take the emotional truth of those years and build a structure around it that actually says something, instead of just recording it play by play. Some scenes are lifted almost exactly from life but nothing in this happened exactly true to my own life. Others are composites, three different people I've worked with poured into one character, because that character needed to carry a theme of emotion, not a biography. Most things in the book never happened to me at all, but they're true to what that world does to people, and that felt more honest than sticking rigidly to my own timeline.

Some of it isn't mine to tell as fact

Being honest about my own mistakes and low points is one thing. Writing other real people's lives down as documented fact, without their say in it, is another. Fiction gave me a way to use what I'd lived through and witnessed without pinning it to anyone by name, or claiming a version of events that isn't entirely mine to claim.

That's also, frankly, the sensible way to write about an industry you still work adjacent to, about people you still know. Memoir draws a hard line and says "this happened, to these people." Fiction lets me say "this is what it felt like to be inside this strange machine" without making that promise.

It's more honest this way, not less

I think there's an assumption that memoir is automatically the more truthful format for this style of book, and fiction is somehow the lesser, more evasive one. I'd argue the opposite happened here. Writing it as a novel meant I wasn't performing my own life for the reader, curating myself into a sympathetic narrator the way memoirists often, consciously or not, end up doing. I could let the main character be genuinely unflattering, wrong and self-sabotaging, in a way I might have softened if I were writing under the explicit banner of "this is my real story, be kind to me."

So yes. Ask me which bits are true if you want. I'll probably just smile and tell you to reread the acknowledgements. But the honest answer is that almost none of it happened exactly as written, and almost all of it is true.