I am afraid that this is making readers forget what it is that a good novel can do. It's not real, they say, it's a work of the imagination. Forgetting that a work of the imagination that makes us believe in it is a very fine thing indeed. It can take dull ordinary facts, the quotidian lives of ordinary people, and make them riveting reading. Not a patience requiring chore.
Journalists sometimes place undue emphasis on actual-happening creating authenticity.
The twist is that it is the wife who beats her husband, she is a tough and violent person, and he suffers in that mute and strangely accepting way, at least for a while, that is so typical of cases of wife-beating. Matt Condon has been married but isn't now. Don't forget, this book is a novel. But journalists have been ringing up his friends and asking them is the story true, was he beaten up by his wife, is he writing about what actually happened. Of course they have their suspicions, but so far nobody will confirm them.