A few years ago I attended Bar Con at a writers’ conference in Colorado Springs and I spotted one of the agents about two drinks in with an empty seat next to her. Jackpot! I’d recently showered and was two drinks in myself so I felt brave enough to approach her, order another drink, and ask the burning question, “What should I do if I want to write a memoir?”
She looked at me and rubbed her eyes, “Don’t. Write a novel, unless you’re famous.”
Since I couldn’t think of a way to make myself famous, I decided to novelize my memoir. I researched this and found a class through UCLA Extension called Autofiction. We read a few posts about what makes something autofiction. The Guardian lists the Top 10 Books of Autofiction.
Academic definitions aside, I call it what Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck wrote for a long time without putting a label on it. It’s also a way to take all that memoir material and make it into a novel almost unapologetically.
Autofiction is a great place for your edgy confessional pieces, your stories about lost love, or your previous life of crime (you want to fictionalize that). Supposedly, we should think about ethics so we don’t accidentally ruin someone’s imaginary reputation. I’m not sure how to avoid that entirely. I assume most people I tend to base caricatures on don’t read my books.
Based on my interactions with others who write similar pieces, the sense of vulnerability doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue as I thought. Pam Houston said she doesn’t tend to worry about exposing something embarrassing or harmful about herself, but sometimes worries about hurting someone she knows. Other people want to tell a good story but worry about the information getting back to their boss. I worry that someone will take my piece and try to figure out which character corresponds to which loser I recently dated. Some readers take this as a game and resent it.
In defense of autofiction, it is the art of taking the strange material we are gifted with through life experience and pressing it into a form where we can make sense of it. Outside of fiction life doesn’t have tidy beginnings, middles, and ends. No satisfying resolutions. In autofiction, we can solve some of the nagging problems at least in an imaginary space. That gives me peace sometimes.
What experiences do you have that seem primed for autofiction? Have you read any that you loved or hated? Let’s talk about it!
[Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash]
