In The Möbius Book, an ingenious merging of fact and fiction by American writer Catherine Lacey, Lacey recalls including in one of her pieces of short fiction a poem about growing up with ‘an angry man in your house … and if one day you find that there is / no angry man in your house – / well, you will go find one and invite him in!’ (The poem appears in Lacey’s stinging short story ‘Cut’, first published in The New Yorker in 2019.)

Since its publication, the poem has been taken up by women around the world and amplified through social media. In this supposedly factual section of the book, Lacey (or at least a version of Lacey) notes how worried she was that the ‘angry man’ with whom she was at the time living might recognise himself in the poem, despite the ‘tacit belief between us that the fictional poem had nothing to do with him’. She is safe, she implies, as long as he is laughing it off by saying ‘yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief’.