What is Autofiction?

Why, as a novelist, I want to tell the truth

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” ~ Hemingway

The truth sometimes feels like the easiest thing. I often think, Part your lips and let the words pressed against them fall out. Say exactly what you mean. Fuck it, just roll the dice. You can never regret the thing you said or did honestly, because after all, you did it as you. We have so little control over outcomes. Things happen on their own timelines. What is the meaning of life, if not to live our own out? To see what happens.

Conversely, the truth can be a very hard thing to put into words for a traumatised person. This is something I read recently, in THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE by Bessel Van Der Kolk, but it’s also something I know, because I was diagnosed with PTSD in 2017, before losing five babies.

It goes something like this: your brain shuts down the centre that feels terror, which happens to also be the centre that feels feelings. You become detached from your emotions and physical sensations. Without physical sensations and emotions, we cannot fully know what is happening to us. Without fully knowing what is happening to us, we cannot make decisions and act on our own behalf a.k.a. we lose agency. Another byproduct: if we do not know what is happening to us nor how we feel about it, and thus are not alerted to our own needs and see no reason to figure out what they are, we also lose our relationship to the truth. This is something that happens to the protagonist of my novel with regards to her relationship. What happened between her and her ex? She begins the novel unsure. How does she feel about it? She doesn’t exactly know, but bad. What does she want to do about it? What does she need to resolve her bad feelings? No idea.

Here is the problem with writing autofiction: I am also unsure about what happened in that relationship, there’s no purity to how I feel about it, and I’m also unsure how to resolve the bad feelings for my character.

Another issue with autofiction: sometimes I lack confidence in writing about my ex and our break up. Am I just whining? (Is someone going to quote from this essay in a review in a years’ time and tell me yes, I am whining?)

Full disclosure: by now, I’ve mapped out Part One of the book and am looking at Part Two, where she finally dives into dealing with her post-break up feelings. Except she doesn’t really know how to deal with them; she doesn’t want to feel so bad, so she’s distracting herself with another guy. Do I write about the other guy, even though he’s kind of inconsequential? What would I write about if I didn’t? She works and sees this guy and goes out. Is it boring just to write about a (female) guy dating a (male) guy, trying not to think about another (male) guy?

I want to write about the trauma of the fallout of this relationship and how it affected me. I feel very illegitimate doing so, and yet it affected me to a great extent, for years. It affected how I saw the world, my partner choices, how often I went out, how under-confident I became in my work, where I moved, who I had a family with, where I am now, and (ahem, formerly) my digestion.

I’m worried people will tell me, but you’re just two relatively privileged people dating and yes there was some drama, but come on… And yet, I know plenty of people put through the ringer by break ups.

As I mentioned in a previous essay, this is the stuff of life. When I feel under-confident about writing it, I try to tell myself this. That it matters to so many people. That everyone I know talks to me about love, loss, being dumped up with, leaving someone they didn’t want to leave. I ask myself ~ what is the truth? The truth is that break ups change us in complex and lasting ways.

I have learnt as a writer that the closer you hew to your own truth, the more people see their truths in your story. We are all so alike and our stories are all so alike. We are a collective. Some say we are one interconnected organism. We are human. Our stories are about what it means to be human, and we can all relate. Everything that happens to us is so specific, and the more specific it gets the more universal a story is. Weird, but true.

So, I am going to write this piece of Break Up Fiction, but how to do it ~ when I’m not sure what happened, or why it caused me to change the way I did, or what I needed to move away from it, or what I’ve learnt from it. Even writing this, knowing it destroyed me in so many ways, I think, yes but why would anybody care? And, who is going to see themselves in this? And also ~ how do I do justice to the many ways in which this ricocheted like the splinters of a bullet through my life? And also ~ how do I get across that it wasn’t just the break up in the end that was difficult but the fact that it built on things I’d already learned, about being a woman, about relating to men, about what happiness was supposed to be…?

Enter ~ autofiction. Autofiction is a blurring of novel and memoir. I am a fan.

Early murmurs of Autofiction in my reading life include WOMEN by Chloe Caldwell ~ an account of a woman’s first love affair with another woman. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s MY STRUGGLE ~ an epic, seven-volume, extremely detailed, recounting of a life. Lucia Berlin’s oeuvre, made popular by the reissue of her short stories in a collection entitled A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN. Lucia is now my favourite author alongside Patti Smith, whose work JUST KIDS was straight memoir, but whose other works blend life writing with drifting, dreamy prose that lingers in the fictional worlds of imagination and sleep. IN THE DREAM HOUSE by Carmen Maria Machado felt like a moment for me, in publishing, where autofiction may have gotten its own shelf at the most on it of bookstores. The reissue of I LOVE DICK by Chris Kraus (not actually a fan of that book particularly, but loved her biography of Kathy Acker) was also a flag, waving.

In televisual realms: arguably GIRLS by Lena Dunham is autofiction and, even more so, her earlier film, TINY FURNITURE. Greta Gerwig’s biography peeks into the themes and world of FRANCES HA, with both her parents appearing in the movie and the main character a dancer (Gerwig first studied dancing before becoming an actor and then director). NORA FROM QUEENS, starring Awkwafina, is a hilarious send-up of the actress’ own life, headed towards 30, smoking weed, living at home, in Queens, with her grandma and dad.

The reason I like autofiction is because I think we are imbibing too many narratives that are not true. I noticed this a few years ago. Algorithms are biased by design. Fake news. Alternate facts. Headlines tweaked towards the scandalous for search engine optimisation, whether or not that represents the article they are attached to. As a writer, I am sometimes asked to write about subjects I know nothing about just because a publication thinks of me as kinda cool or young and hip (this is a historical reference, I am now proudly and wisely 36). I notice some popular blogs aren’t that well researched. Things retweeted with the best of intentions on social media aren’t accurate, and that can have unintended consequences.

For a while, I’ve wondered how responsible it is to write fiction in this climate.

I think of my past novels and wonder, if I had stuck to the absolute truth, what would they have been? FLICK would have been about a bitter, resentful, pissed off, teenaged, female northerner who showed up to class late, got straight As, and enjoyed a wank. GOLDEN BOY would have been a non-binary narrative as it is now, but centered around an arty girl with a strap-on who wasn’t sure if she wanted to truck with gender, and her requited but too-down-on-herself-to-follow-through-on crush on her dream boy ~ the sweet, smart, very cool captain of the football team. DEAD GIRLS… well, that was pretty close to real life, except Thera would have died with Billie (my interest in this kind of stranger killing, and how the girl’s living friends survive and process it psychologically, was peaked by a similar killing, that happened in the next county over from mine when I was thirteen ~ sadly both best friends were killed together).

I do sometimes feel like it would have been better to write non-fiction or autofiction in my earlier books. I don’t want to think I might have fucked it up for Katie, aged 15, who hides her beautiful bitterness and powerful rage because she thinks girls can’t be like that, or for Margot, aged 21, too shy to show that guy her strap-on (that he would love… obviously).

But as I write this, I also know that I made those choices because it was 2009 and 2011 and 2016 and I didn’t think I would be published widely if I didn’t make Flick a guy and GOLDEN BOY about Max. Not being published widely means I wouldn’t have earned enough money to live on, and I wonder if I would still be writing. Times have changed. Fifteen years of gender activism has moved the needle. Now we have Eliza Clark. There’s no need to hide anymore.

Imagine feeling gut-punched, slugged, wrung out. Like after that conversation between lovers. The one where you finally get to know each other. Where you talk until dawn. Where you are brutally honest. How much further that talk gets us than the alternative, how like muscle do we break in places and grow from those breaks stronger and more resilient, more ourselves, more in love, more loved, more seen, more heard, more accepted. We fall asleep, spent, relieved ~ yes, to have got through it but also not to have to pretend anymore. The truth will set you free, right? That’s what I picture autofiction to be.

In life, if every move we make is truthful we progress minute by minute towards ourselves. If we hide our selves away, deny our feelings, ignore our needs, each small lie leads us off our paths until we do not know who we are or what we feel or what we need or how to get back.

I would like to write the truth now. I would like to progress inch by inch towards a greater understanding, towards the “self” of the book. I feel I might be able to with this new novel, if I can just close my eyes, hew closely to what really happened, and move forward in the dark… trusting that I am all the light I need to make it through.

Further reading: THE DEATH OF TRUTH by Michi Kakutani

Further watching: THE SOCIAL DILEMMA (doc, Netflix)

For you, paying readers: a little poem I wrote within the year this book is set, 2017 (age 29)