More on authenticity in writing

Anita Brookner writes in a review of Margaret Atwood's book on writing 'Negotiating with the Dead":
No man is a hero to his own body, observes Margaret Atwood in her disquisition on writers, still less a woman. In the act of writing (or painting, or acting, or composing) the limited corporeal self is left behind, so that another component is free to gain strength and live. ‘The author is the name on the books. I’m the other one.’

[...]the writer has two lives. He, or more probably she, is the hapless character who goes to the supermarket, performs domestic tasks, and is invariably worsted in arguments, and that other one to whom Margaret Atwood refers, the cold logician who observes a beginning, a middle and an end, who determines causality, although subject, like everyone else, to the irrationality of circumstance.