To consider another example, one that explicitly collapses the boundaries between fiction and reality—as many of The Wire's fans know, "Snoop" (Felicia Pearson) was actually born and raised in East Baltimore, a drug dealer, and a convicted murderer who served five years in prison. In a recent article in Rolling Stone featuring Pearson (who was convicted in 2011 on drug charges), Ben Wallace-Wells describes Snoop:
Her early life was imbued with near total deprivation: She was born cross-eyed because of her mother's addiction to crack, fed with an eyedropper by her foster grandmother, stripped and locked naked in a closet at the age of five so her mother could sell her clothes for drugs…By the time she was 14, the street were so much a surrogate parent that she called the drug dealer she worked for Uncle and the kingpin he worked for Father.