Disclaimer

English author and filmmaker Renée Knight was a prolific director and screenwriter before changing her focus to fiction. After directing art documentaries, she transitioned into screenwriting, writing narrative film and TV scripts for the BBC, Channel Four, and Capital Films. In Disclaimer, Knight draws on her documentary filmmaking experiences. Using her own knowledge of the field, Knight infuses Catherine with the ability to aggressively research and draw out the truth from reluctant subjects. She depicts Catherine as more comfortable behind the scenes rather than as the subject of examination. Knight also structures the novel using timestamps for each chapter, akin to the geographic and temporal title cards that mark filmed scenes. While alternating narrative perspectives is a common fiction technique, Knight uses the different points of view in a documentarian way, to show that shared events can lead to different valid and real responses, and to avoid privileging one experience over the other. Stephen’s first-person sections mimic a documentary’s talking head segments, whose subjective recounting is intercut with a documentary’s more objective portrayal of events—reflected in the Ravenscrofts’ third-person sections.

Knight was inspired to write Disclaimer when she used a close friend as inspiration for a characters in an unpublished work; she was struck with the idea of a person detecting similarities between themselves and a fictional character (“

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