Our Autofiction Fixation

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Our Autofiction Fixation https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/books/review/autofiction-my-dark-vanessa-american-dirt-the-need-kate-elizabeth-russell-jeanine-cummins-helen-phillips.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesbooks:

tobermoriansass https://tobermoriansass.tumblr.com/post/646034017082277888/our-autofiction-fixation :

“Write what you know” has been the novelist’s imperative at least since Charles Dickens retooled fragments of an abandoned memoir for “David Copperfield,” and reached a logical extreme with the autofiction boom of the last decade. The belief that every novel is a self-accounting is timeworn, too: Some early readers of “Lolita” suspected that only someone with the mentality of a child predator could have conjured the depraved Humbert Humbert. Publishers, meanwhile, often appear to want readers to see books as thinly veiled autobiography, and their publicity campaigns typically emphasize authors’ personal connections to their work. This can backfire, as with the P.R. blitz for Jeanine Cummins’s border-crisis blockbuster “American Dirt,” which exaggerated the author’s Latina heritage and suggested that her husband is an undocumented Central American immigrant https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/books/american-dirt-oprah-book-club-apple-tv.html?searchResultPosition=3 (he’s from Ireland).

The expectation that fiction is autobiographical is understandable for the simple reason that so much of it is. When that expectation becomes prescriptive, however, critical reading can devolve into a tiresome kind of fact-checking. In a tepid review of “The Need,” a writer for The London Review of Books used Phillips’s acknowledgments section as a bizarre gotcha, saying it “testifies against her vision of motherhood as embattled isolation, thanking 10 family members from three generations for help.” A reviewer for Kirkus, the trade publication, took a similar approach, though to opposite effect, in a rave for “Shuggie Bain,” writing, “Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down — then read the first sentence of the acknowledgments and lose it.”

There is something backhanded about using authors’ personal statements as a Captcha tool for verifying the emotional resonance of their work. This tendency reached a nadir with the conversation around Kate Elizabeth Russell’s “My Dark Vanessa https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/books/review/my-dark-vanessa-kate-elizabeth-russell.html?searchResultPosition=3,” in which the author, facing unfounded allegations of plagiarism, felt compelled to restate publicly that she, like her protagonist, was a survivor of sexual abuse https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/my-dark-vanessa-book-controversy-explained-american-dirt.html. An author working in good faith can’t win at this game. If she is forced to confirm that her material is autobiographical, then she risks forfeiting both the privacy and the power of transfiguration that fiction promises. If she denies it, then she surrenders a badge of authenticity that she may never have wished to claim in the first place, and lays herself open to accusations that she is appropriating the pain of others.

Whether or how much a book draws from real life isn’t strictly quantifiable. In his essay collection “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/books/review/alexander-chee-how-to-write-an-autobiographical-novel.html?searchResultPosition=1,” Alexander Chee posits a kind of epistemological mystery: A reader may see himself accurately reflected in such a novel, but the writer may not. Of his debut, “Edinburgh,” Chee writes: “I wish I could show you the roomful of people who’ve told me the novel is the story of their lives. … I still don’t know if I’d be in that room.” Part of this mystery is due to the chaotic consciousness native to the novel-writing process, which requires a degree of possession. Nobody is asking you to do what you are doing. There are more than enough novels in the world, and nobody is more painfully aware of that than the person attempting to write one. To dig a book out of the ground can be backbreaking, hand-tearing work; you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from or who will recognize it as belonging to them, too. And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you. (Your picture was not posted)