A portmanteau of autobiography and fiction, autofiction is a literary genre with long historical roots but a steep uptick in popularity in recent decades. Since the late 2000s in particular, we've seen a new wave of inventive novelists – Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and more – adopt autofiction with writing that blurs the line between fiction and truth – and questions whether the two can really be distinguished.
About the genre
What is autofiction?
The term ‘autofiction’ was coined in the late 1970s by French novelist Serge Doubrovsky, to describe his novel Fils. He wrote that it was neither an autobiography, which he considered “a privilege reserved for the important people of this world”, nor purely fiction, but a work of “fiction, of events and facts strictly real”.
This is as good a definition as you’re likely to find; most critics would agree that autofiction is some combination of an author’s real-life characteristics, relationships and experiences, plus some aspects that have been imagined or invented.
But from there, consensus falters. Does Sappho’s use of the first-person pronoun “I” in Ode to Aphrodite make it autofiction, as some have argued? What about Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which takes inspiration from recollections, details and characters from the author’s own life?
Writing in the Guardian, French author Nina Bouraoui called autofiction “a work of truth” in which “the ‘I’ of the narrative is the author”, but even that is contentious. “Truth” is subjective, and autofiction doesn’t necessarily need to be told in the first-person voice to fit the genre.
What’s the difference between autofiction and memoir or autobiography?
While both genres often cover similar topics (such as a person’s life and experiences) and are centred around the perspective of the author/narrator, autofiction is distinctly different from memoir and autobiography because it blends fact with fiction.
Works of autofiction can take creative liberties, with the author changing facts, characters or events, often in the service of exploring deeper themes or narrative ideas. Memoirs and autobiographies, meanwhile, are factual self-written accounts of a person’s life and experiences.
Why is autofiction so popular?
There are many possible explanations for the notable uptick in autofiction’s popularity among writers and readers since the late 2000s. Some point to the concurrent rise of social media, celebrity culture, and reality television, as concepts like authenticity, identity, relatability, confessional accounts, and self-presentation all lend themselves to autofiction.
As these themes have become more commonplace in our media landscape, it’s no surprise that readers are interested in novels that hew closer to some perceived autobiographical truth – especially those penned by women, authors of colour and LGBTQ+ writers, who have used the genre to explore ideas of selfhood.
Autofiction can also be a powerful vehicle for exploring taboo topics with honesty and flair, or creating some distance between the author’s experiences and those laid out on the page. After dealing with vicious backlash to her earlier memoirs that almost stopped her writing, Rachel Cusk was widely celebrated in 2014 for her seminal work of autofiction, Outline. Hidden in the book’s innovative approach to storytelling is something deeply truthful, but where Cusk ends and the narrator begins remains ambiguous.