According to former students I spoke with, in the spring of 2006 Alexander Maksik lost his position teaching at the American School of Paris (ASP) for having an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. Their relationship allegedly lasted over a semester, and ended when Maksik was quietly dismissed by the school shortly after the young woman, named Marie in the book, had an abortion. The students said nearly everything that happens in the book happened in real life, and almost all the characters are based on real people.
The real-life "Marie," whom I corresponded with via email, said that she is disgusted that he is getting literary kudos for re-telling her very real story. She said Maksik included a number of very personal things she told him in confidence in the book, and that she has worked for the past five years to move past the shame and guilt she felt as a result of the affair only to re-encounter it all again in a widely praised novel. Maksik never asked her for permission.
I interviewed Maksik onstage at Elliott Bay Book Company and he seemed charming, humble, and very excited to talk about writing with a roomful of people. When we discussed the fictional affair, he seemed to show a believable-enough level of disgust with the teacher in the book. He said—I'm paraphrasing here, as it was a couple months ago, and I wasn't taking notes—he saw the teacher, if anything, as the villain of the piece, and he expressed alarm that readers seemed to find the character so appealing.
Maksik hasn't commented on the matter yet. I have an e-mail out to his publisher. If these charges are true, he's a scumbag of the highest order. Nothing can change the fact that his novel is remarkably well-written, but if he took advantage of a student's trust twice—first by engaging in a sexual relationship with her, and second by using personal details she shared with him in that relationship—that's about as sleazy as you can get.
