The personal crisis that I experienced caring for my dying partner, Alison, was described by a disability counsellor as “grieving in instalments”. As a filmmaker, one way I tried to process Alison’s dying was by writing screenplays about biographical subjects who had all suffered from psychological trauma. For this process to have any benefit, I felt it essential to gain an accurate understanding of the interiority of my historical referents. I also knew that choosing to engage with these characters in the form of the biopic would involve navigating the ethical tensions that arise between fidelity to the facts, and the commercial storytelling imperatives of making a mainstream biopic. But my concerns about capturing the essence of my historical subjects were challenged from an unexpected source. It was not the film producers pushing for a marketable story that created a pull between fact and fiction, but my disability counsellor, who suggested that my tales of biographical others were, possibly, all about me. My counsellor’s insight was the catalyst that compelled me to take a deep dive into the intersection of screenwriter and biographical subject in the authorship of the biopic. This book charts that journey. My biographical subject is British middleweight boxer Randolph Turpin, who died in 1966, the year I was born.