Autofiction is having its moment and if you haven’t noticed you’ve been reading on autopilot. Described as the collision of autobiography and fiction, autofiction has been criticized as lazy, self-indulgent and downright solipsistic. Reading autofiction can feel like being pranked on (see Chris Kraus’, I Love Dick) or being given access to a new best friend who has chosen to give all of themselves to you, the reader (Elena Ferrante, Neapolitan trilogy). This is of course an illusion of intimacy and one can expect the author to falsify important details or characters. Memory, truth, and recollection are toyed with in the genre, as fiction is used in service of a search of self.
Autofiction has gone from a cult classic in the 90s to a bestseller mainstay. Fiction with the authors’ persona stalking the pages includes Rob Doyle’s Threshold, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous. My personal favourites are Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You and the experimentalist Chris Kraus’ Aliens and Anorexia. However, the author as a central character of fiction has long been used as a popular device. See Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or James Baldwin’s John Grime in Go Tell it to the Mountain.
‘How much of this is a true story?’ and ‘Is this real?’ are questions that have been on readers’ minds since the dawn of literary fiction. In autofiction, our impulse for speculative gossip is addressed directly. As personal identity became increasingly public through time, we have been given unsatisfactory answers to these questions. The 17th century saw the author’s name as a social construct attached to a book. In the 20th century, with the advent of TV and radio, the status of the author was promoted and became a heightened public presence. Fast forward to 2021: the author is a constant media presence. Their image is a shadow that is inescapable in their work. The internet gives us a false solution to the ‘truth’ of a novel. How much of the story is derived from the author’s lived experience is a Wikipedia search away.
I find autofiction to be the most contemporary form. It is the only mode that can consistently incorporate the internet. Autofiction counteracts the cultural urge to flaunt our success and instead often centres around narratives that end in failure. Self-representation and narrativization of identity are second nature to millennials and Gen Z. Autofiction takes the fleeting rapid-fire observations of social media, co-opts them, and makes them slow. The traditional novel’s intricate plotting of events is waived for a looser narrative of experience. Interestingly, the dated letter and email form is a common narrative device. The epistolary novel, favoring subjective experience and slow communication, is vogue in autofiction. Exemplified in Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick and Rob Doyle’s Threshold, the technique is also popular in fiction, ala Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. There is a sense in this new trend that audiences and writers are yearning for a deeper connection and intimacy. The subjectivity of letter writing and the performance of putting one’s thoughts on show for another is, to my mind, emblematic of how our way of relating to one another has been changed by the internet. Radically, the form is self-aware of the celebrity culture that governs our media consumption and purchases. The author and character’s persona become blurry in autofiction, similar to Instagram profiles and “real” life. In autofiction, confessional and vulnerable voices are prized in our cultural moment fixated on individualism.
When women writers or writers of colour are interviewed about their fiction, there is often a presumption that they are writing from their lived experience. Repeatedly they are asked how much they draw on their own lives in their writing and which characters they have modelled on themselves. As if women and people of colour are unable to invent or create worlds and characters outside their own experience. Autofiction can be an attempt to reclaim the personal but alas, still exists in the context of patriarchy. Consider two markedly different critical receptions of autofiction: Ben Lerner, acclaimed author of the Topeka School, was praised as vulnerable; meanwhile, the reception of autofiction pioneer Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick largely focused on uncovering the identity of her novel’s love interest. Perhaps women’s autofiction, seizing an exposed, painstakingly aware and personal style, wishes to defy misogynistic readings of fiction.
In autofiction, the author constantly announces their presence to the reader, creating a distance. This is contrasted by the intimate use of the ‘I’ form, narrated as a real person’s experience. The purity of the first person ‘I’ form is constantly contested, as it wrestles with selective truth. In the 21st century truth, history and voice are dubious. To intermingle what can be true or artifice about yourself is a perfect response to our (in)credible times. This act is disruptive to us, the readers, who are interested in identification with what is sympathetic, moral, and real. Autofiction throws these values on their heads. The novel’s traditions and motives are being revaluated for our times and we are lucky to be alive to witness the process.
In the words of Chris Kraus, we can view autofiction ‘as a philosophical intervention. Though written in the first-person, the books are well-constructed rants, not introspective memoirs. Finally, she thinks, a female public I aimed towards the world, more revolutionary that the 20th century male avant-gardes! This is the only counter-cultural trend worth mentioning.’
In a sense, autofiction can be considered anti-realist. Instead of chronicling the details of external reality, the genre occupies a psychic personal space. Subjectivity is prioritized and dreams, secrets, and the private inner world are made into a fictive landscape. Autofictive prose has a poetic sensibility; its obsession is with sensation, memory and emotion. I must admit, this writer lives for the new sentience for sensitive girls. Chris Kraus’ lonely girl phenomenology and outcast philosophy gave me licence for my own unconventional life experiences that would be outside appropriate subject material for fiction.
I’m torn as to whether autofiction is a tool for self-liberation, a marketing ploy or a response to the internet. To write oneself as the main character requires an egotism that is refreshing and startling to read. Escaping into the psyche of another is engrossing and freeing in a time where we are almost too familiar with ourselves. Should you engage with these books you will find that the best autofiction transcends the self and becomes an inner spiritual experience.
Pictured: Meena Kandasamy (picture credit: Two Circles)
