by Anne R. Allen
A trendy word in publishing recently is “autofiction,” short for “autobiographical fiction.” The term isn’t new. It was first invented in 1977 by author Serge Doubrovsky when talking about his memoir-sh novel, Fils.
And what about those Creative Nonfiction essays that fill literary magazines? (A goldmine for memoir writers.) Can you call them autofiction?
Unfortunately, “autofiction” is not an official category in the publishing world, according to Publishers Weekly.
That means authors still have to decide if what they’ve written is fiction or nonfiction before they publish it, so bookstores will know whether to put it on the fiction or nonfiction shelf.
Guidelines say if there are real people in it and all the incidents really happened, you can call it nonfiction, even if you’ve changed the names of the real people. But if some events or characters are made up, you’re better off calling it fiction.
Readers Often Expect Fiction to be Autofiction.
Authors have a more complex issue than the the shelving dilemmas of bookstore clerks. (Although I relate. I worked in many bookstores over the years.)
The problem is a lot of readers think all fiction is based on the author’s life. Especially if it’s written in the first person.
Even more readers expect authors to be like their protagonists. I’m amazed at how many readers expect me to be an ultra-polite New York fashionista like my series heroine, Camilla. (People who actually know me are laughing hysterically here.) I even once had a beta reader make condescending comments that were obviously aimed at a ditzy debutante, not a 30-year veteran of the publishing industry, educated at Bryn Mawr and Harvard.
I’m not alone. Canadian humor novelist Melodie Campbell has written about meeting fans of her satiric “Rowena” fantasy series. They were sadly disappointed because they expected her to be just like her hot and horny heroine, Rowena, whose bodice is literally ripped in every hilarious book.
There is Plenty of Thinly-Disguised Autofiction Lurking in Popular Fiction.
Readers can be forgiven their delusions. Some novels are indeed thinly disguised autobiography — including classics. Look at David Copperfield, Look Homeward Angel, On the Road, and The Things They Carried.
Scandals can erupt when people recognize themselves in autobiographical fiction. There was major drama around the story Cat Person, by Kristen Roupenian, that ran in the New Yorker in 2017. People found it “eerily accurate” in its description of contemporary dating. Many thought it was a work of autofiction, or a disguised personal essay. Ohers treated it like nonfiction.
In 2021, a writer named Alexis Nowicki wrote an article for Slate claiming Cat Person was inspired by stories from her own life that she had confided in the author.
That’s the kind of situation where authors can run into trouble. We’re exposed to stories every day — in the news, on the Internet, overheard in cafés, etc. Those stories nestle in our subconscious minds. Long after we’ve forgotten their origins, they creep into our fiction. That doesn’t mean we’re “stealing” them on purpose.
There has been ongoing saga concerning a character in Donna Tartt’s famous academic mystery, The Secret History. The character is Judy Poovey, the wild California girl with the red Corvette. Apparently people have even started social media accounts in her name on TikTok and other sites.
Last year, Lily Anolik wrote an article in Vanity Fair that documented the search for the “real” Judy Poovey. Everyone was sure she was a thinly disguised real person. Anolik claims that Donna Tartt’s characters, like Mary McCarthy’s in The Group have “feet of clef.” (You have to use the French pronunciation to get the joke.)
But guess what? Nobody has found the “real” Judy Poovey. And that’s probably because Donna Tartt is a talented fiction writer who can make stuff up. 🙂
Should You Fictionalize your Life Story?
But what happens if you do want to present your real life story as a novel? I think it’s not a bad idea. It’s easier to write a novel than a memoir. It’s also easier to sell.
Most beginning writers I meet are working on a memoir. They’ve lived an interesting life and want to get their experiences down on paper. Unfortunately, writing a memoir that anybody wants to read (outside your immediate family) is a major challenge. A good memoir should read like a novel, but it has to follow the facts, so structuring can be a huge problem.
Also, nonfiction readers feel betrayed when the story turns out not to adhere to the facts, so altering the truth in something you call a memoir can make a lot of people angry, as happened with author James Frey.
Why Autofiction Can Help Memoirists.
Many people who start to write a memoir find it’s easier to turn it into autofiction. That way they can shape the events into a compelling three-act structure that readers will enjoy. The blurbs can tout it as “inspired by a true story,” so people who like to read about real events will be satisfied.
Novelizing stories of your own life can also save you the huge problem of putting real people into a book and worrying you may hurt their feelings or even get sued. But if you give them different names and a few different characteristics from the original, most people won’t recognize themselves. Make your awful boss fat and dowdy, and she’ll never claim the character is her. 😊
However, make sure that if the character is recognizable as a real person that you don’t say anything libelous about them. That’s when you can run into deep doo-doo with lawsuits. Even if you give them a different name. And don’t just change the boss’s name from Jan McMurphy to Jen McMurtry. Make a leap to Cathy Crapper or Heather Hooker.
Novelizing your life story can also be cathartic. You can go back and tell off that 8th grade teacher who said you’d never amount to anything, and escape that abusive boyfriend with more dignity than you actually felt.
Just make sure it doesn’t all turn into a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Readers can tell when you’ve turned yourself into an all-too-perfect Mary Sue.
Reading a Personal Fantasy Can Be “Like Getting Flashed in the Park”
What nobody wants to read about is that smug character who is the author’s fault-free alter-ego: aka Mary Sue / Gary Stu. This is a trap new writers can fall into. I did it all the time in my teenaged writing.
I wrote about myself as a plucky girl fighting the redcoats beside George Washington, and put myself into more TV westerns than I can name — always as the brilliant, sharp-shooting heroine who beat all the bad guys at poker and had men falling at her feet.
If you find yourself fulfilling your own fantasies in a scene, it’s probably time to hit delete. (As Ruth said in a great post in 2019, the delete button can be our best friend. )
As Laura Miller said in a 2010 article in Salon: “Readers don’t want a daydream the author is having about herself. It’s an imposition, being unwittingly enlisted in somebody else’s narcissistic fantasy life, like getting flashed in the park. And just about as much fun.”
There’s nothing wrong with personal fantasies. We all have them. But we need to be aware they can make lousy fiction.
Not Everything is Autofiction. Authors Really Do Imagine Stuff.
For most novelists, our fiction come 90% from our imaginations, with a few characters wandering in from real life, like that nasty woman who took the parking place you’d been waiting for last week, your husband’s psycho ex, who loves to leave one star reviews for your books on Goodreads, or the arrogant doctor who misdiagnosed your skin rash. (The Mystery of the Dead Dermatologist!) But I think most novelists create our stories and characters all by our ownselves.
However, where does that imagination come from? The events of our lives make up the well of experience and memory that feeds the creative mind. When you’re writing about your heroine’s bad boyfriend, a few of your own bad boyfriends are sure to parade through your subconscious. And the final product may have characteristics of each of them.
So should we disclose that character as “loosely based on a composite of real humans”? Na. That could be said of any character in any novel ever written.
If you want a hilarious definition of autofiction, here’s Walker Kaplan’s take at Lit Hub (written with tongue firmly in cheek.)
by Anne R. Allen (@annerallen) March 5, 2023
***
What about you, scriveners? Do you write autofiction? Have you thought of novelizing a real-life experience? As a reader, do you want memoirs to be “true” to the last detail?
And I still have some digital ARCs available!
Free to anybody who might like a review e-book of Catfishing in America–a comedy about romance scams. It’s due to launch on March 17th! If you want one, let me know at annerallen.allen at gmail dot com or in the comments. There is no autofiction involved. I’ve never actually been involved in a romance scam. 🙂
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Then there’s biographical fiction. Here’s a story — written by Shirley S. Allen (my mom) — based on the life of my great, great grandmother, Roxanna Britton
Roxanna Britton: A Biographical Novel
by Shirley S. Allen
“Jane Austen meets Laura Ingalls Wilder”
The ebook is available at all the Amazons, Kobo, Nook, and Scribd
This novel, by my mother, the late Dr. Shirley S. Allen, is a rip-roaring tale of how the west was won. It also happens to be all true. It’s the story of my great, great grandmother, Roxanna Britton, who pioneered the Old West as a young widow with two small children.
It’s got romance, action, cowboys (not always the good guys) Indians (some very helpful ones) the real Buffalo Bill Cody, and a whole lot more!
Widowed as a young mother in 1855, Roxanna breaks through traditional barriers by finding a husband of her own choice, developing her own small business, and in 1865, becoming one of the first married women to own property. We follow her through the hard times of the Civil War to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to a homestead in Nebraska to her final home in Elsinore, California
I couldn’t do it. I’d be too worried people would be hurt. A memoir would see everything from one person’s POV, and the experience other people would have about the same situations might be, and probably is, vastly different. When Knausgård published his six (!) volumes about his life, he called it fiction, not non-fiction. And when his family and friends, and other people he had written about, got mad – as anyone would, the fact that he had called it fiction, protected him. It was a mess and so much drama – great for promotion, of course. His ex-wife later wrote her version of the relationship and got the last laugh. Now he says he feels guilty for making so much money on the project. I think I’ll stick to my fiction stories even if I do have a mad life history … 😀
Natalie–I didn’t know that about My Struggle. I have to admit I had no desire to read it–especially with that title. I figured it would be like being trapped with some self-absorbed talkaholic whining about all his misfortunes. I have no idea why it was so popular.
I had no idea what autofiction was – now I do. Still no intentions of writing anything to do with my own life though. And no, I’m not my characters either.
Alex–Me too. It’s not that I haven’t done anything interesting in my life, but mostly I made mistakes I don’t particularly want to brag about.
I’m not much of an autofictioneer. I admit that tiny flashes of my life squeeze themself in here & there when I’m writing, but they’re typically so microscopic, they’re not too recognizable. Thanks for another fine post.
CS–“Autofictioneer” is a great word! Those microscopic bits are what make fiction authentic. I think all authors have them.
I started out writing genre fiction — an excellent way not to confuse your own fabulous, totally fascinating self with the actual requirements of creating professional-quality fiction.
I’m with Alex. I’m not my characters and I have no intention of writing autobiography, autofiction, or auto-anything-else. Always seems like amateur night to me.
Ruth–Great insight! Yes, if you write genre fiction, you don’t have room to squeeze your own self-reflection into it. You’ve got to keep up the pace. And yes, much autobiography comes across as unprofessional journaling. I guess that’s why I resist reading it.
Jack Kerouac had a big time problem, when he created Dean Moriarty, a thinly disguised version of Neal Cassidy. Everybody expected Jack to be just like Dean M.
Henri–I wonder if On the Road would be considered autofiction these days. Certainly people expected Kerouac to be just like his characters.
I always quote P.D. James who said ““All fiction is largely autobiographical…” and then quip, “in which case, I’m in BIG trouble”. I must say I don’t really believe it: the idea that a writer can’t escape themselves seems a bit uncharitable, yes? I suspect that you admire Camilla Randall, as I do my heroes. But that’s a far cry from wanting to really BE them. Hey, not all the time anyway!
Will–You’re right. I don’t think I’d like to be Camilla, even though she does have great shoes. 🙂 But of course I admire her. At times when I want to punch somebody in the face, she always thinks of the nicest polite put-down. That thing I never think of until I’m lying in bed that night. I agree with the second part of PD James’ quote–if it were all autobiographical, I’d be in BIG trouble!
Very accurate description. I read two chapters and decided that was all I would ever want to know about the man. It’s a strange thing.
Natalie–Some memoirs can be a delightful read. Travel memoirs can be great fun. But when something is titled “My Struggle” I figure the reader is going to be doing some struggling too.
The closest I’ve come to the “auto fiction” is that I pepper my female characters with personality/character traits from the very real people that I’d met in my lifetime. Beyond that, only a very warped bizarre interpretation of my personal Walter Mitty makes it into my stories on a consistent basis.
GB–Your “personal Walter Mitty”–I love that! Giving your characters a few traits of real people is what all novelists do, I think.
There is actually a publication called Creative Nonfiction. I sent a piece to them (a story about a doctor who escaped South Africa when a teen. They didn’t use it. That’s my story.
Elizabeth–Creative Nonfiction is a hot genre. But I think mostly it refers to kind of confessional essays about the author, not third party stories. But there should be a home for your kind of story.
I will admit to letting bits and pieces of real life personalities sneak through from time to time from myself as well as other people I’ve met. We are the sum total of our lives and to not use what we’ve learned or encountered would be a waste.
At my age I mostly consist of stories and memories. All my yesterdays more real than a tomorrow that may never come. But autofiction? No thanks. There are things in my life I’ll carry to my grave. Ain’t nobody’s business but my own.
Brenda–Some people are cut out to write memoir and some aren’t. Autofiction really seems to be a kind of memoir. But not using the stories and characters in our heads wouldn’t just be a waste. It would be impossible.
I’m much too private to want to write autofiction. Besides, my characters are a lot more interesting than I am! Having said that, I have given tangential reference to a few of my own experiences in my books.
Kay–Our choice of genre has a lot to do with our tolerance for public scrutiny, doesn’t it? I don’t want to tell the world about the embarrassing skeletons in my closet. But some gifted writers like David Sedaris can weave them into delightful stories that make us laugh. He’s got stronger psychic armor than I have.
One of the manuscripts I’m currently writing was inspired by… was based on… my life. Inspired. Based. I’ve been wrestling with that for years. Your article gave me even more food for thought, Anne.
Leanne–It sounds as if you’re writing autofiction! Something based on your life but fictionalized. A lot of great writers have done it–look at David Copperfield.
David Sedaris is wonderful. I was listening to one of his stories while I was out running one day, and I had to stop because I was laughing so hard.
Thank you for the belly laugh…we all deserve hilarious laughter at least once a week! You often provide my chances to laugh…indeed, many smiles. Thank you. I struggle with telling folks whether my book which is already published is historical fiction or narrative fiction, but by your written definition here I can just call it nonfiction because my fictional characters have been placed into 1869 events with real people named as they are named in the history books acting as much as we can interpret they acted at the time…so historical fiction or historical nonfiction…hmmm…so many readers were turned off history while growing up in our school system…my hope was to entice young readers into enjoying looking back at the good, bad and ugly times in our history.
Judy–Hi there! [waves] My mom had this dilemma when writing her novel about her great-grandmother. She settled on “biographical fiction.” She followed the events of Roxanna’s life as she knew them from old letters and records, but she needed to add made-up characters to fill in the blanks. With nonfiction, all the characters need to be real people. You can change their names to protect living people, but they have to be based on actual people. If there are made-up people, it’s fiction.
Thanks for the mention, Anne! I must say, I get a kick out of my 18 year old student who want to write a memoir. Most of them haven’t experienced any major loss or disappointment yet – *so* necessary for creating empathy in readers. Myself – I shudder at the thought of anyone reading about my past!! And to be honest – I read to escape reality, and I write to entertain. That said, the emotion and grief I have experienced in real life certainly colours my fiction. As you know, I was widowed decades earlier than expected a few years ago, and that grief puts depth into my latest book, The Merry Widow Murders.
Melodie–You’re so right that a character needs to have loss, trauma, or disappointment to create empathy in the reader. Some 18-yr-olds can have enough trauma in their young lives that they can write an interesting memoir. (Say, a child soldier or a mass-shooting survivor) But most don’t.
I’m half-way through The Merry Widow Murders and I just love it. But you’re right that it’s darker than most of yours because of Lucy’s grief.
Thanks, Anne. Your article has made me reflect upon the characters and their activities in my writing and how their responses often bubble up out of my life experience. Autofiction! But I am often surprised by where their story often goes beyond the reality of my personal life experience.
Keith–That’s where fiction comes from. We conjure up a character from our subconscious, and then they magically start making their own decisions and following their own path. Real life inspires our fiction, but it doesn’t define it.