Can We Talk About Autofiction?
The first time I gathered the courage to let another human being read a deeply personal piece of my writing, I was a married mother of two and the reader was my married lover. When he finished reading it, this man swore he loved what I’d written, and I decided he was my soulmate. It turned out the affair—which ended soon after, as did my marriage—had a larger purpose. It helped me come out as a writer. In fact, the traumatic incident I’d shared in those pages appeared twelve years later in my published memoir, A Lethal Inheritance. It showed up again in my soon-to-be released debut novel, Orchid Child.
As you might have guessed, my ex-lover didn’t make into either.
As a published writer of memoir and fiction, and as a teacher of writing, I share this episode, of which I’m not proud, for two reasons. First, to shine a light on today’s robust online writing community. Its existence gives aspiring writers many more, and I dare say healthier, outlets for sharing their work than were available a decade or two ago, making this the best of times to be a new writer. By new, I mean writers of any age who, like me, wrote in isolation for years before taking the plunge. Now, nascent authors working in every genre can find beta readers and writing groups with whom to share work in progress. They can also choose from a wide array of classes to hone their craft.
Just not the same classes.
That brings me to my second point. The artificial separation between memoir and fiction in the teaching of creative writing. By extension, the same counterproductive wall exists in our larger conversation about autobiographical writing.
A case in point. In just the few days since the announcement of this year’s exciting winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I’ve read one of Annie Ernaux’s novels referred to as ‘a thinly veiled memoir,’ and one of her memoirs called ‘a master class in autofiction.’ Such offhanded labeling, which I connect to a deeper void in critical thought, can make these the most confusing of times for new writers who consciously choose to combine elements of autobiography and fiction in their literary output.
Arguably, it doesn’t do much for readers, either. Not when they receive a daily firehose of self-revelation delivered directly to their personal devices. Whether the medium is the written word, audio, or video or a combination thereof, the authors of these personal missives tend to use the breezy syntax of influencer culture to convey authenticity with varying success, making sorting and interpretation of this deluge a necessary if unthinking habit for those on the receiving end—aka all of us.
But what if the literary community was willing to lend some order to this chaos? By which I mean a more literate context for processing at least the written parts of this flood of content.
In the current don’t ask, don’t tell literary environment, writers and by extension readers of autofiction are left to essentially figure it out on their own. From where I sit as a writer and teacher of writing that falls into this critical void, we need new teaching and workshopping methods to nurture novelists who do more than a little borrowing from real life, and memoirists who freely add flights of fancy to their life stories.
The theoretical infrastructure to address this void, although dusty, is already there.
Most creative writing teachers would agree that the craft of narrative storytelling applies equally to both memoir and novels. They would acknowledge that there’s no way to teach either genre without drilling students in character, plot, theme, dialogue, setting, and theme.
That’s where the consensus about likely ends. Teachers of students writing memoir make clear that they owe it to their readers to hew as close to what happened as humanly possible. If they choose to speculate, these student writers are instructed to say exactly what they’re doing in the text, or risk losing readers’ trust. I made exactly this point in a memoir craft book I published in 2011, and I teach it to this day because it still applies when a writer chooses to stay strictly within the memoir genre. But what if the memoirist doesn’t wish to stick to this one genre? As things stand now, that’s when they enter no man’s land.
The publishing world operates from the premise that if the word memoir is stamped on a book’s cover, a reader processes what she reads differently than if the same book were labeled a novel. We can only guess what would occur differently in readers’ minds if the labels were switched, but we cling to the distinction—as if we knew. As a result, published memoirs are still routinely subjected to purity tests and shaming rituals, with hell to pay if a relative or acquaintance takes issue with the memoirist’s depiction of certain people or events.
Across the virtual hall, instructors of fiction readily acknowledge that real-life inspires much if not most fiction. But then most quickly make clear that for a work to be a proper novel, the similarity between the author’s life and art should be less than obvious. What if it is obvious? Then the author should play coy or dismiss the question as irrelevant, even insulting.
The model for this wink-wink literary culture comes largely from publishers who take the safe way out and routinely categorize obviously autobiographical work as novels. This practice is reinforced by novelists who protest when readers assume or come right out and ask if their writing is about them. Comically, this same response is heard from prominent authors who name their protagonists after themselves and write plots mirroring their readily apparent real lives.
Australian author Helen Garner, an early practitioner of auto-fiction in powerful work like The Spare Room, took this stance in a 1985 essay, writing, “This is the worst, most unanswerable, most infuriating question a writer has to confront.” She continues, “The word ‘auto-biographical’ is like a red rag to a bull because it seems to ignore the amount of hard slog we do, the endless work of observation and witnessing and things in our work that are pure invention.” One hopes Garner has gotten over her exasperation in the decades since. I somehow doubt it since you hear the same thing said by speakers at virtually every book festival.
There have been isolated voices of reason from which writers and teachers of creative writing can take heart and direction. In The Situation and The Story, published in 2001, memoirist and literary critic Vivian Gornick decried the labelling of William Sebald’s books as novels. “We realize that it is the narrator who is the agent, the unifying idea. Not through what he tells us about himself or even through what he sees as he travels, but through the way he sees what he sees.” Seybald himself opined that to be subjected as a reader “to the rules and laws of fiction” had for him become “tedious.”
This same superseding role for the authorial voice Gornick identified in Sebald’s work, where the narrator serves as both protagonist and as the primary agent for moving the narrative forward, applies to Rachel Cusk’s recent trilogy. In Outline, Transit and Kudos, Cusk’s narrator observes the world of a celebrated author who is obviously herself. Cusk appeared to concede that she is writing autofiction when in an interview she threw a literary grenade, saying, “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.”
At that point, until quite recently, the literary conversation stopped.
In his 2022 publication from Columbia University Press, Free Indirect, The Novel in a PostFictional Age, literary theorist Timothy Bewes begins his introduction with this same quote from Cusk and goes on to invoke Seybald, Zadie Smith, and J.M. Coetze, among others, as he makes the case that, unlike novels of the early and mid-twentieth century, the thought or meaning of the modern novel lies largely in what is unsaid. This, he says, along with the meta fictional awareness shown by characters of their own literary or formal quality, ‘renders indeterminate the distinction between reality and fiction.’
Bewes’s provocative argument seems to support the argument that since there’s no meaningful difference between fiction and nonfiction in today’s leading edge literary output, the genre conventions that once applied to both no longer apply. But then what? I would argue that precisely because of this blurring of lines, new thinking, and more conversation and clarity about the relevant theory and practice, are needed. Without it, authors are still on their own.
Yiyun Li has dealt devastatingly with the experience of a son’s suicide in both fiction and nonfiction, indeed the two are often indistinguishable, such as in her novel, Where Reasons End, when Li’s narrator communicates with a young man who exists in an undefined space about his decision to end his life. Coinciding with the release of her memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Li told an interviewer, “I always used to say strongly that I was not an autobiographical writer, so strongly it was clearly suspicious. … I can now say that is just a lie.”
Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong, who in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous portrays the relationship between a young poet and his illiterate mother in the form of an extended letter, described the character of Little Dog as “a more patient, idealized version” of himself. My first thought reading this comment was, wouldn’t it be fascinating to have Vuong sit down with Cusk, perhaps invite Douglas Stuart, Akwaeke Emezi, and Sigrid Nunez, and ask them to break down the creative process of translating their authorial selves to the protagonists of their novels? To explore when and why they let parts of themselves go by the wayside in favor of other traits or careers or narrative circumstances?
In a 2015 essay, Leslie Jamison asked the provocative question, “Why do we like that space of uncertainty in which we don’t know what’s been invented and what hasn’t?” Her premise, that readers who are not writers give this issue more than a moment’s thought, is debatable. It seems to me that readers assume an author’s life and art overlap to some degree. In asking the question of an author, they’re simply wanting to know how much. Maybe there’s a better answer than zero.
Meanwhile, writers of both memoir and autobiographical fiction continue to struggle with questions which are going largely unaddressed. For example, what does a memoirist owe her readers when she takes sizable liberties with the truth? Do we just assume readers get that pages of dialogue detailing conversations that happened twenty or thirty years ago are largely made up? If an author chooses to provide a caveat for said conversation, how can this information be artfully delivered?
In autofiction, how can authors make creative use of their proximity to (or distance from) themselves as narrators to enhance character and plot? Beyond not pissing off parents or siblings, what problems do fictionalizations of stories drawn from real life most effectively address? How do novelists and memoirists draw on the concept of the unreliability of memory in creating narrators?
There are many more questions and, I trust no shortage of solid answers out there in today’s large and generous writing community. Let’s dig in and have the conversation, shall we?