The Invented Life is a mock biography of rebel-in-her-own-time Kitty Duncan, a gal who comes of age in the 1950s South alongside a mother June Cleaver would envy. Of absolutely no interest to Kitty: acting docile, playing dumb, losing her suntan, remaining a virgin, and doing anything anyone insists she should do. Biographer/narrator Mo first encounters Kitty at Clemmons University, where Mo is a freshman and Kitty an eighteen-year-old pregnant wife passing time in married student housing. Kitty's rudeness and questionable hygiene, her dalliance with Mo's nominal boyfriend and neglect of baby Caesar, appall and infuriate. And yet, within that exasperated fury lurks an admiration that can't quite be stifled. For better or worse, Kitty Duncan is neither compliant nor dull. At novel's end, the two women meet and "truth" squares off with "fiction." Among the revelations of that reunion: -The imagined is more real than the real. -Storytelling, itself, is an act of liberation.