hearing for the first time that novelist Patrick O'Brian (of _Master & Commander_ fame) invented much of his own biography, didn't know how to sail & had no practical experience doing it, wasn't Anglo-Irish gentry but rather English working class, barely educated, concealed his early marriage... Everything he learned about sailing & the 19th c was from obsessive research & reading books. O'Brian comes out to be a far more puzzling, eccentric, twisted, anachronistic figure who lived in isolation on a small hobby farm in France, deeply secretive, insecure, brooding, exiled, aloof, yet TOTALLY COMMITTED TO THE BIT. I like him even more now (am currently reading Master & Commander)