Good recommendations for #autofiction reading?
— alina stefanescu (@aliner) May 15, 2017
Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography. That’s the strict meaning of the word. It can also refer to fictionalizing a real event of the writer’s life.
In attempting to write the physical condition of pregnancy, I keep running into the epistemological limitations imposed by masculine bodies. Perhaps prose poetry is a form equipped to manage these epistemic challenges.
Barbara Browning on Ben Lerner:
We both had an approach to autofiction that drew attention to its own devices.
I’ve found that most people like being fictionalized. More often, the anxiety they express is that after they’ve been written into a novel, I’ll somehow be “done” with them—but for me, writing someone into a novel is never about forgetting them. If anything, it’s a way for me to hold on to people I love.
I think perhaps the idea of the writer as someone who "uses" people is itself suspect. It makes the writer into a sort of predator—maybe even an abuser—whereas what you seem to be saying is that writing about someone or incorporating aspects of them into fiction is very often an expression of love, as it surely is when I write about you or aspects of you. But I think that a kind of love can be expressed even when the person is not painted in a totally flattering light. Under the umbrella of "love" in this case I'm including attention, focus, fascination, and the warmer aspects of the emotion. Writing is a way of connecting to people, and the writer sculpts in flesh. We only have other people, the sensual world, to clothe our ideas in.
You have to remember there’s always what’s said and then there’s what happens. And there’s always a discrepancy between them.
Karl Ove Knausgaard:
…the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined my efforts.
Alina:
The gap between the male body and the female body is, in many ways, unbridgeable. I understand male resentment on they front-- to bear a body that bears only possibility, reliant on permission. The performative aspect of pregnancy fascinates me-- the difference between a wanted pregnancy and an unwanted approximates the value of the female body as desired or undesired. That's why the Women's March read like an auto-fiction. There were so many male bodies standing in for pregnant female bodies, filling in the imaginative gaps, performing resistance (and-- somehow) pregnancy.
There’s a really long history of trans people writing memoir that goes back as far as the earliest sex-reassignment surgeries, like Lili Elbe, who died in the course of an operation in 1931. A couple of years after her death an autobiography came out, called Man into Woman. That’s quite an interesting text in itself because the central character has a male pseudonym and a female pseudonym that weren’t the names Lili Elbe used either pre- or post-transition. Then it’s edited by someone called Niels Hoyer, which is in itself a pseudonym. So you have this text that’s gone through several layers of authorship and editorship, and no-one will put their name to it.
Twice he asked her to cancel the gym membership because he’d read a story in which a hallway of mirrors stole a girl’s image from her body and gave it to others. He wanted her image to be something between them. He didn’t want others to imagine the wench.
In fiction, I believe that the only truth and reality that matter are the words on the page. Events may or may not have transpired from real life, but the words themselves represent the only authenticity. So it’s not about shame and honesty—in fact, honesty is a word whose usefulness starts to vaporize in the context of a novel. In the realm of the imagination, the facts hold no currency.
Alina:
I don't think Christ ever mentioned a fetus. The fictionalizing of an anti-abortion Jesus is the greatest heresy of the age. A blockbuster.
All you have to do is walk into a bar and have somebody start telling you the story of their life to realize that everybody, to some degree, is an unreliable narrator—especially of him or herself. I try very hard to be honest in my fiction, again not because I find that morally superior but because it interests me, what that means, to try to be honest in fiction. I talk about that in this book—that is, the narrator explains to someone who’s lied to her, “Even in my fiction, if I say, ‘This really happened,’ then it’s true. It really happened.” If she tells you something that didn’t happen, she says, “This is fiction.”
On the porch, her husband flaps his hands and mimicks bird calls as a substitute for the emoticon she might have glimpsed of him on screen. She is not allowed to see his emoticons, as a man's emoticons must remain private.
