That's just fiction

Fictional autofiction, bodies vs. vibes, calling things whatever you want to call them as long as it helps you write them

I’m not going to recap AWP other than to start with something Ananda Lima said during a panel, which is that she is interested in the idea of ‘fictional autofiction.’

I am also interested in the idea of fictional autofiction, which seemed, as soon as she said it, like a way I could describe what I am trying to do in my novel-in-progress. Last summer, I wrote to you all:

I’m in a memoir/essay place right now, but I’ve been thinking a lot about essayistic fiction — not necessarily autofiction but fiction that feels like it from the tone, the point of view, the way it might backburner or forego plot in favor of meandering through the narrator’s mind. I’m zeroing in on what I like in a novel, why I loved Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test so much, why I love a Sigrid Nunez novel. (What are other novels like these? Let’s make a list.)

Not necessarily autofiction but fiction that feels like it. Fictional autofiction.

After the panel, I met up with my agent and told her about this idea. She said, perhaps exasperatedly, “That’s just fiction!” I gathered from the ensuing conversation that calling something ‘autofiction’ diminishes its salability in the current publishing market. And she’s right, it is just fiction. I actually don’t love calling autofiction autofiction. It’s just fiction! All fiction scavenges from life! But fictional autofiction as a designation feels more useful to me, as a writer and a reader at least — it tells me something about what the book is going to feel like.

Later that day, I mentioned the idea to Mike Nagel and he said he understood what it was getting at, because autofiction has a certain ‘style.’ Yes, maybe part of it is a style thing. First-person narrator, obviously. Very, very close. This is a narrator who divulges. It doesn’t, of course, mean you’re getting the whole story — in fact, how could you, with a first-person narrator? It’s a novel more interested in consciousness than linear plot.

But the novel of consciousness is not a new thing. It’s a modernist thing, it’s Woolf. Is the only distinguishing mark of autofiction the fact that author and the narrator usually share the same name, pointing and laughing at the fact that it’s impossible to tell what’s “true” and what’s “made up”? It’s all made up! It’s just fiction!

How a lot of people think of autofiction, lol. Taken at the Griffith Observatory the week before last.

At that 92nd Street Y panel on Tove Jansson back in March, Alexander Chee made a comment about how Jansson’s novels do not do the thing many contemporary novels do, the thing Brandon Taylor calls “character vapor,” and Kate Zambreno interjected, “I think he was talking about me.” And Alexander Chee apologized and Kate Zambreno said it was okay, that she is not offended by it, and it was a funny little moment and we all moved on.

But I can’t stop thinking about it because if the writers who have been called out for this are indeed writing character vapor (or what Taylor has also called “catalogue fiction” in Bobos in Ikea) then I love it. And Taylor criticizes it but also admits he loves it too: “What information does find its way into the self is portioned and held at arms length. See Kate Zambreno’s great and very vibey Drifts.”

But here’s the thing — Drifts is a novel of the body. Drifts is a novel of pregnancy. Drifts is a novel with not one but two ticking time bombs, countdowns to an external book deadline that inconveniently overlaps with an internal — and 100% unmovable — due date, at which point the narrator’s mind and body will be irrevocably changed, likely rendering her incapable of writing the same book she might write pre-baby. It is a novel of consciousness but it is also a novel of swollen fingers, blood draws, HORMONES, vomit, uncontrollable tears, spastic diarrhea, hemorrhoids, stitches — an undeniable physicality crashing into the self. “I don’t recognize myself in this uncomfortable and unbearable body,” the narrator says. The only way one could read this book and find only vibes, only vapor, would be to skate over all the pregnancy stuff, which I’m sure some readers did. Because it’s unfamiliar or uninteresting to them, because it’s gross (or as Zambreno says in the book “goth”), because it’s hard to parse looking at the other hidden behind one’s navel from navel gazing.

Or, more generously, maybe this book is just not their thing.

Back to autofiction, fictional or otherwise, I don’t think Zambreno embraces that designation anyway — in this conversation with Nate Lippens she speaks of “our interest less in what is often tabbed autofiction but more the novel of consciousness.” And really it doesn’t matter what we call what we are trying to do, except to the extent that is helps us do the thing, and maybe find other people who are also trying to do it. And definitely call it whatever if you’re trying to sell it, GODSPEED you agents who know how to sell things.

Going back to what Ananda said about the type of work she’s interested in, “fictional autofiction” or whatever you want to call it. She’s not just trying to do it; she’s actually doing it. In her book Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, she plays with form and frame narratives and seems to be having a whole lot of fun. And I guess this is my way of saying I’m still trying to figure out my own messy project, chasing the ideas that excite me and trying to ignore the rest.

This week in writing

I’m working on two interviews and trying to figure out a new writing schedule, a way to work Morning Writing Club back into my life despite this year’s non-conducive school dropoff schedule and work-work kind of being crazy. This coming week I want to print off the novel and mark it up on paper as a way of figuring out what needs to happen next…

This week in reading

Last week, I finished Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman. It’s an interesting project, and now I want to read all the contemporary reactions to it. But what I care more about are her sentences — I find her sentences to be incredibly compelling and I want to understand why. When I read her, I pick her apart.

This week in Leave news

I was part of this unconventional episode of The Lives of Writers that weaves together interviews with all the spring 2025 Autofocus Books authors — me, Erin Dorney, and Teresa Carmody — with commentary from Michael Wheaton. This was really fun and I’d love it if you gave it a listen.

Love you all, no matter what you think about autofiction, fictional or otherwise.

Love,
Shayne