Heh. My first novel had three viewpoint characters, and everybody who critiqued it for me assumed that if there was a character with authorial perspective, it was one of the two mouthy girls. When in fact it was the quiet fat boy.
I suspect that a similar thing is likely to happen with the thing I'm working on at the moment: the fair-skinned stubborn white girl is going to be all too tempting for people to read as authorial insertion, but when someone in the book is being more or less directly me-ish, it's always the Chinese-American guy.
And to a certain extent you can't (by which I mean, one can't) completely deny involvement with any of the character perspectives, because you were able to think like that. You were able to get that perspective across. So you can say, no, that's not how I approach the world, and that can be accurate, but you can never say, I would never think such a thing, because...well. There you are.
I am doing a great deal of mental exercise at the moment, because I just finished an unpublished (and, in the author's opinion, unpublishable) novel by a friend that had an even more transparent authorial viewpoint character. And is set in an equivalent period of life to one my friend hasn't talked to me much about. And it'll get easier as the book settles into my head, but at the moment I am having to remind myself that it was not autobiographical, and so I have to be very careful with keeping the boundaries clear in my head. I have the urge to ask him, "Are you afraid of x the way your character is? Did you do y, or was that made up?" And I think that would be obnoxious, so I'm not doing it. But it's definitely work to keep myself from it.
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I suspect that a similar thing is likely to happen with the thing I'm working on at the moment: the fair-skinned stubborn white girl is going to be all too tempting for people to read as authorial insertion, but when someone in the book is being more or less directly me-ish, it's always the Chinese-American guy.
And to a certain extent you can't (by which I mean, one can't) completely deny involvement with any of the character perspectives, because you were able to think like that. You were able to get that perspective across. So you can say, no, that's not how I approach the world, and that can be accurate, but you can never say, I would never think such a thing, because...well. There you are.
I am doing a great deal of mental exercise at the moment, because I just finished an unpublished (and, in the author's opinion, unpublishable) novel by a friend that had an even more transparent authorial viewpoint character. And is set in an equivalent period of life to one my friend hasn't talked to me much about. And it'll get easier as the book settles into my head, but at the moment I am having to remind myself that it was not autobiographical, and so I have to be very careful with keeping the boundaries clear in my head. I have the urge to ask him, "Are you afraid of x the way your character is? Did you do y, or was that made up?" And I think that would be obnoxious, so I'm not doing it. But it's definitely work to keep myself from it.