premise: The Savage Detectives ("Los Detectives Salvajes" in Spanish) is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. The novel tells the story of the search for a 1920s Mexican poet, Cesárea Tinajero, by two 1970s poets, the Chilean Arturo Belano (alter ego of Bolaño) and the Mexican Ulises Lima.
hypothesis: Roberto Bolaño based the character of Arturo Belano on himself.
reason: Roberto Bolaño created a character in his novel named Arturo Belano, which was an alter ego of himself. The model may have struggled because I did not use the term "alter ego."