Autofiction: An Ideology of Incuriosity

“I don’t want to hear about your little life, OK? Because you don’t know nothing.”

Toni Morrison’s advice once given to her creative writing students at Princeton resurfaced over the summer, sparking conversation in online literary circles. Some lauded Morrison for not mincing her words, while others accused her of having been unnecessarily harsh towards budding writers. What I find more interesting is the type of narrative that Morrison appears to be criticising: a narrative that is overly personal, precious, and limiting for the writer’s creative abilities. Autofiction immediately comes to mind.

Autofiction — that mysterious portmanteau of autobiography and fiction — is popularly defined as a literary tradition that blends real-life events with fictional inventions, subsequently blurring the boundaries between narrative and the author’s lived experience. Although iterations of this experiment have appeared many times across centuries of literary traditions throughout the world, it gained new heights of commercial popularity and formal analysis in the mid-twentieth and into the 21st-century. Writers such as Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgård, Annie Ernaux, and Jeanette Winterson have come to define autofiction as it is understood and read today. But despite the growing repertoire of autofictive entries, is the ‘genre’ any less murky? The works of the writers previously listed range from sleek, obscure novels that enmesh the voice of the protagonist and author to reskinned autobiographies that elicited media frenzies and ethical debates. Clearly, a consensus has not been reached. But, to return to Toni Morrison’s prescient advice, I wonder: Do I want to hear about your, or anyone’s, little life? Even a Booker Prize longlisted life?

Let me clarify. My quarrel with autofiction has little to do with its actual conceit: an enticing experiment in character, persona, authorship, and the nature of the novel. It is, rather, with the place it has begun to occupy in the literary genealogy tree. Some autofiction writers would argue that, in a post-post-modernist world whose only saving grace is a novelistic form ‘innovated’ to an early death, our little lives are all we have left to write about. As Rachel Cusk said in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, “I don’t think character exists anymore.” Her statement boldly rejected the traits long-held as essential to the novel, and fiction as a whole, which excited me. But she goes on to say that ‘character,’ exemplified by the Victorian novel’s conventions, is not particularly relevant to a person’s actual life. In the modern world, and therefore in the modern novel, ‘character’ (and plot, and arcs, and all those stuffy Victorian inventions) naturally dissolves into the amorphous composite of self-identity. 

Critics have identified a sense of embarrassment or superiority in these writers at the idea of writing fiction, or ‘playing pretend.’ Truth, these writers say, is not found in other people’s lives (or our imaginings of them), but in our own, and anything else is an outdated elision of that truth. 

What truth do we lose when we refuse to reach out into the unfamiliar? The auto-cannibalistic bent of autofiction (a high-brow codification of ‘write what you know’) encourages an ideology of incuriosity. This is not a treatise against the autofictive enterprise, but rather a request to reconsider the association of the self with importance and truth. As Toni Morrison said, to retreat within ourselves is to celebrate our ignorance. If we nurture our creative appetites on a diet of our own grievances, memories, and worldviews alone, we starve our work before it can find the page.

Illustration by Tessa McCormick