We should never, of course, conflate authors with their central characters. It’s a common modern malaise to assume that the attitudes and experiences of a novel’s protagonist are the same as those of the writer. As an author of some pretty nasty characters in the past, I wouldn’t want people thinking I’d ever behave in that way myself.
Having said all that, you sometimes get an inkling that an author is using their own experience as a launching off point for their fictional,
