While I was on holiday, I read The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin. It's about a successful gay writer who reads a novel by a young boy who was sexually abused as a child and is now suffering from Aids. The writer gradually comes to have doubts about whether or not the boy is real, or merely a creation of his "mother".

It turns out that Maupin's novel is based on his real doubts about a real book, published by a possibly-not-so-real boy or his "mother". Read this commentary on MetaFilter.