The roman à clef, that is to say, the true-to-life story turned into fiction, is a refined and venerable genre. I suppose it was Marcel Proust who made the roman à clef respectable. Almost all fiction is taken somewhat from real life. Even the heroes in science fiction and action stories are based loosely on someone the author knew.

The true “key” to the “novel,” the roman à clef is great fun when you are able to identify who the real people were in actual life, the ones featured now in the fiction. And, usually, they are playing their roles under different guises and names.

Guessing games are always fun, and when I picked up Alex Witchel’s latest book, I got a kick because I knew all the characters. And I especially knew the chief heroine of The Spare Wife because she turns out to be one of my dearest friends.

Writer Witchel is a handsome-looking woman herself, but even she would say her pal protagonist, the woman she delineates in her novel, is an unusual knockout. To prove it, here she is – Suzanne Goodson.

Suzanne Goodson, who is called Ponce Morris in The Spare Wife

Photo courtesy of Liz Smith

This charmer from Tennessee came to New York to model. She didn’t much like it. She went to law school. She didn’t much like that either. (She did a lot of pro bono work protecting children before she hung up her gloves.) I personally discovered Suzanne one night when I found her sitting in “21” with an old friend, Bob Bach, a TV producer. She was so dazzling that I instantly misinterpreted her presence as meaning that old friend Bach was stepping out on his wonderful wife, Jean. I inquired of the duo, “Are you two an item?” just to see what they’d say. They said they were, which proved to me that they weren’t. Later, I discovered that Suzanne was engaged to marry Bob’s boss, TV game show creator Mark Goodson. Mark was making Bob take up Suzanne’s time so she would not stray to some other guy while Goodson was in California.

And so Suzanne married Mark and became a good wife to an irascible, difficult to please, ambitious and feisty genius. He invented the show “What’s My Line?” and many another entertainment.