Memoir that Doesn’t Have to be True: The Devil’s Handshake of the Autofiction Writer

When I started my memoir My Iliad Odyssey, which is now available for preorder at my website, I was aware of some genres that straddle the fence between fiction and nonfiction. To me, memoir is about making an honest effort to write what you remember. The emotional truth of the writer’s experience is what matters, even if some of the facts are challenge-able. If the writer believes it to be true, then it belongs in a memoir.

What typically happens when you write a memoir is you think of something that would make the story better, even though it didn’t actually happen. If you include that element in the story, from my vantage, you’re now writing fiction. At that point, it’s only fair to your reader—or at least to my reader—to call it fiction.

We all recognize writers who write books that rely on the sense that you’re reading about their real life, even if they include fictional elements. One of the chief ways to do so is through the genre of autofiction, which is practiced by several bestselling authors such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Sigrid Nunez.

“Autofiction,” coined in the 1970s by Serge Doubrovsky, refers to fiction that takes the form of fictionalized autobiography. The overall effect of the prose is similar to that of memoir—without the author conceding the ability to make things up. Opinions vary on what makes a work autofiction, but I believe there is one essential element to the form: The details of the narrative must suggest the author's life to the point that it becomes a challenge to read the work as anything but memoir. The work compels the reader to believe they’re reading about the writer and not a fictional character. That’s what makes a piece of autofiction work.

I became aware of autofiction in 2015 with the sudden literary popularity of the My Struggle series of books by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I bought My Struggle: Book 1 and found myself transfixed by the author’s ability to mine the banal aspects of his life for elements that made me want to keep reading: his fraught relationship with his father, his teen angst, his pain surrounding his father’s death. I read Book 1 quickly and proceeded to listen to audiobook versions of Book 2 through Book 5 on commutes to and from work. I listened to each of these books repeatedly. For the final Book 6, I bought the paperback and dedicated several weeks in the fall of 2020 to reading its 1,200 pages. I remember the experience as infectious, delicious. I’d never read a book so long. I even loved the 400 pages on Hitler. Part of me wants to start the whole series over again right now.

So, why did I sense that My Struggle—as well as other autofiction titles I’ve enjoyed in the interim—did not ascend the heights of the great literary works of the 20^th century, such as those by past favorites Updike, Morrison, and Bellow? It lacked some majesty I associated with the work of these giants. It felt a little pulpy, a little cheap. I enjoyed it, but it wasn‘t really good.

What was wrong with it, to my mind? And if the answer was nothing, then what was wrong with me? Why was I placing an impediment to my enjoyment of these titles by believing they were somehow less important, less exemplary? I loved the process of reading and listening to My Struggle, yet at the same time I found it lacking something that made me want to call it great fiction.

Central to the pleasure of autofiction is the voyeuristic rush I get from reading about people—especially literary people—going about their lives. Despite its admitted fictional elements, I read autofiction as I suspect it’s meant to be read, as though it offers some real sense of what it’s like to write a bestselling literary work (My Struggle), or to be a well-known literary writer in your community (Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend), or to jet-set around Europe to teach writing workshops (Rachel Cusk’s Outline). I call this the Lifestyles of the Writerly Rich and Famous aspect of these stories. Autofiction writers may or may not be rich or famous, but to me, many are at least at the top of their field. Autofiction seems to allow for a peek behind the curtain of successful writers’ lives, and I indulge.

I also suspect autofiction works are enjoyable to me the way genre works are enjoyable to those who love genre fiction. As a youth, I never developed a deep kinship with genre work. After becoming a convert to literature during college and reading vociferously for decades, autofiction didn’t strike me as important in the way that I found The Adventures of Augie March or The Bluest Eye or One-Hundred Years of Solitude important. Still, I clearly enjoyed it. It was technically fiction, right? And it had at least some of the trappings of literary work. Were my feelings of diminishment autofiction’s problem or mine?

With autofiction, the line between fiction and nonfiction is purposefully blurred for reader effect. Technically, autofiction is fiction, but for me, it's impossible to separate Karl Ove Knausgaard from My Struggle’s narrator, or Sigrid Nunez from the narrator of The Friend, or Rachel Cusk from the narrator of Outline. On an important if unspoken level, I read these books as though I'm reading about the lives of these authors. For this reason, I've never liked the term “autofiction.” I think “barely fiction” is a clearer way to explain the effect of autofiction on the reader and to avoid the misconception that something about the autofiction writing process is automatic.

With its ability to play on both sides of the fiction/nonfiction fence, autofiction ought to be the best of both worlds when it comes to my reading experience. Not only do I get the strong, visceral sense of a real-world protagonist, I also get the advantages of the made-up world of fiction and some of the expanded possibilities that come with that. Or at least I should. In my experience, autofiction doesn’t work that way. Technically, autofiction is fiction, but it sacrifices many of the metaphorical advantages of fiction so the reader feels they are reading about the real life of the author.

When I read autofiction, I adopt a strange position in relation to the work. Despite understanding intellectually that I’m reading fiction, the trappings of the memoir have more to say about how I actually read the book than any supposed made-up aspect of the book’s contents. If the author’s name is Bill Smith, and the protagonist’s name is Bill Smith, and something about the way the story is told suggests that Bill Smith is telling me about his life, and there’s nothing obvious in the tale that points me to the idea that Bill Smith is making things up (say, Bill Smith goes to Jupiter), then there’s a very good if not inevitable chance that I’m going to read the story as though Bill Smith is telling me about his life.

Furthermore, there is a long, more-or-less healthy tradition in storytelling that understands and maybe encourages the tendency for the teller to expand the notion of truth in a nonfiction piece. When recounting stories, people often embellish details for effect. When someone tells the story of the largest fish they ever caught, we understand they’re probably adding a few inches or pounds. Listeners or readers internalize that the teller might be fudging the truth here or there, but so long as the result is an interesting tale and the changes seem more or less inconsequential, we roll with it. Any sin for “stretchers,” as Mark Twain called them, are of the ordinal variety. We crave good stories that feel real. Meet that demand, and we—or at least I—won’t go running to the internet to check your facts.

What feels less substantial about autofiction is that it often sacrifices some of the metaphorical rewards of fiction for the sense that you’re reading memoir. Works of autofiction often go out of their way not to clue you into their fictional natures. For example, sometimes the cover of a book of autofiction avoids including that helpful declarative “A Novel,” even though that’s what most accurately describes its contents. There seems to be an unspoken agreement between the reader of autofiction and its authors/publishers. The author/publisher won’t go out of their way to tell you it’s fiction, and you won’t ask too many questions about the truthfulness of its content, thus avoiding the break in the memoir illusion. This tacit agreement makes autofiction different from roman à clef, a more openly fictional mode of thinly veiled autobiography employed by many famous writers of the 20^th century; or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series of novels, which despite the feel at times of memoir are openly described as her “Neapolitan Novels.” By comparison, the publishing machine primarily describes Knausgaard’s My Struggle series as “Books,” or if you dig a bit, “autobiographical novels.” Autofiction doesn’t want you focused on the fact that it’s fiction. Its appeal is that it feels like memoir.

Let me offer some examples from works of autofiction that hopefully clarify why the process of reading these works feels less substantial to me than reading great fictional work. In Book 5 of My Struggle, the narrator Karl Ove is asked by his older brother Yngve to attend a concert with him. Karl Ove asks his brother if he can bring his new girlfriend Tonje, whom Yngve has never met. Karl Ove and Tonje have just started a romance, and they’re very much in love. Why not introduce his new girlfriend to his brother, another person he deeply loves in the world?

On the night of the concert, the young lovers walk hand in hand to the venue, and they sit with Yngve at a table. The conversation is stilted. Karl Ove buys a round of beers, and Tonje and Yngve warm up to each other, talking in a friendly way. The threesome drink together and move towards the band as they play, and Tonje and Yngve continue talking, seemingly getting along well.

After a few beers, Karl Ove starts to get the feeling that Tonje and Yngve are getting along a little too well. In his drunk and vulnerable state, Karl Ove thinks Tonje sees how much better Yngve is than him, and that she no doubt wishes to be with his older brother instead. Karl Ove grows morose. He can’t believe he brought this on himself. He excuses himself, goes to the bathroom, finds a shard of glass, and pulls it down his cheek. It draws blood. He pulls the shard down his other cheek, pushing as hard as he can, and more blood flows. He goes back out to their table.

The pair, still deep in conversation, don’t notice Karl Ove’s self-harm. Karl Ove drinks more, goes back to the bathroom, sits at a stall, finds the shard, and cuts himself three more times. He goes back out to the table, and this time Yngve comments that perhaps Karl Ove had cut himself shaving that morning. Tonje and Yngve continue to talk, and Karl repeatedly goes back to the bathroom until every part of his face is cut. Miraculously, he manages to get through the concert without either Tonje or Yngve understanding what he’s done. It isn’t until they’re in line for a café later that Tonje screams when she sees blood on Karl Ove’s face. She is shocked, confused. Karl Ove immediately leaves them. Yngve calls after him, but Karl Ove tells Yngve to leave him alone and to take care of Tonje. Karl Ove goes back to his apartment, gets into bed, and falls asleep waiting for Tonje’s knock on the door.

What do I love about this scene? It brings to the fore the common human foible of jealousy, that especially deep kind that the young experience during an early love. Why would anyone be interested in me when they could have x, y, or z? This scene perfectly dramatizes the powerful emotions often associated with youth when one first ventures into the world as someone in a serious relationship. To top it off, Karl Ove imagines losing Tonje to, of all people, his older brother. To me, Knausgaard has effectively set up a scene in which a particular form of deep jealousy rears its ugly head, and I can’t wait to see happens.

And boy, does something happen, something dark and strange that reflects some of the deep pain associated with these feelings. Karl Ove’s decision to self-mutilate feels like a dramatization of his self-loathing, or perhaps his fury at walking blindly into what he suspected would be a pleasant evening but has turned horribly wrong. For whatever reason, the young man wasn’t ready to introduce his girlfriend to his brother. Knausgaard has crafted a fictional scene in which he renders the anger and pain of not being ready for the certain stage of life you happen to occupy, and who can’t relate?

But wait? The scene is fiction, right? All those trips to the bathroom, all those cuts, all that time without anyone noticing. To this point—despite any evidence to the contrary—I’ve read My Struggle as memoir. The deep emotional connection I feel with another real person through what I perceive as nonfiction is, for me, essential to reading Knausgaard’s series. What I was stuck on was, did Knausgaard the author drag a piece of glass down his face to the point of repeatedly cutting himself or not? I thought of him as this handsome if well-worn artistic type in early middle age. In the pictures I’d seen of him—like the ones on the covers of his books—I didn’t remember seeing scars on his face. I searched the internet for images of the author, and none of them seemed to show scars. Did he not cut himself deeply enough to leave scars? The scene reads like he does. Are these internet images Photoshopped? Does Knausgaard have scars on his face from these incidents (there’s a second face-cutting scene in the series), or doesn’t he?

I don’t want to care about the seemingly fictional aspect of the scene. Knausgaard has drawn me in to better understand an aspect of myself and people in general—as Updike et al. have done many times before—and that would be enough in a conventional novel. Instead, I’m forced to grapple with this perceived fiction. I feel like the illusion of memoir has been violated. I’m not focused—at least not entirely and maybe only fractionally—on the truth and beauty of the metaphorical scene Knausgaard has conveyed here, effectively dramatizing the jealousy of the young and in love. I’m focused on whether this glass cutting scene actually happened, and I’m focused on it because to this point Knausgaard has sold me on the fact that he’s writing about his life in a literal way. I obviously find the metaphorical element of the piece engaging, but I’m stuck on the supposed real-life aspect of it.

If the character in My Struggle named Karl Ove Knausgaard was instead named Bill Smith, the problem is solved. Despite the “fiction” in autofiction, I feel autofiction authors rely too much on the sense that their work is memoir, and I can’t let go of that when a scene strikes me as more fictional. Something of the contract between writer and this reader, for me, is broken. Emotionally, I don’t quite know what I’m reading, and I’m pulled out.  

A similar moment for me occurs in the autofiction work The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. In it, Nunez, a writer in Manhattan, is successful enough to publish books and teach graduate-level writing classes. When an older male colleague—with whom she’d had a friendship and some long-past romantic connection—commits suicide, Nunez has unresolved feelings about their relationship. In a weird yet convincing twist, the dead colleague’s widow winds up getting Nunez to take his dog, an extremely large breed of Great Dane named Apollo, the ownership of which poses multiple problems. How will Nunez manage life in her studio apartment in a big city with this large pet? On a deeper level, her relationship with the dog becomes a chance to work out her complicated feelings about the death of her friend and colleague.

Not only is Apollo huge, he’s deeply connected to the dead author. At first, he spends his time seemingly depressed and waiting for his former owner to reappear. Then one night while Nunez lies on an air mattress in her apartment—a result of Apollo having coopted her bed—the dog approaches her. He seems to consider her in a new light. Nunez doesn’t move, letting the dog work out whatever it needs to work out. The dog places a paw on her chest. Nunez recognizes the gesture as the moment in which the dog accepts her in a way it hadn’t to that point. On an important level, she is officially in Apollo’s pack, maybe even his leader.

It's a strange scene, and as a dog lover, one I recognize. I remember the times a dog has placed a paw on me in a similar way, and I found it charming. Still, Nunez’s scene strikes me as fictional, something concocted to dramatize the new, deeper connection between her and Apollo, the mystical acceptance by the dog of its new owner. Yes, dogs do this type of maneuver, but to glean a moment of heightened recognition between dog and owner out of such a gesture, to me, reads like something made up. It doesn’t feel like reality. He probably just wanted a treat.

And why shouldn’t the scene strike me as made up? It’s a novel. Unlike My Struggle, this work of autofiction isn’t coy about its nature, proclaiming “A Novel” on its cover. The problem for me isn’t that Nunez is fictionalizing. It’s that the autofiction form lives or dies on my sense that I’m not reading fiction. The bond Nunez has created with me through the telling of her personal, memoir-like story about her life as a writer—her past experiences with her dead author friend, her discussions about student manuscripts in her classes, her experiences owning this big dog in Manhattan—takes precedence over any use of the imaginative in her work. If I perceive something in the text as imaginative, I’m pulled out of that bond, and I start to question my relationship to the work. Is this scene made up? Are all the scenes made up?

The sense that the writer is telling me the real story of her experiences offers me the voyeuristic treat of getting to peek behind the curtain of a successful writer’s life—or really the life of any successful person. With my sudden questioning of this scene, I now have some doubt whether Nunez had a relationship with the dead author, whether she lived in Manhattan, whether she teaches classes and is successful in the field, whether she even owned a dog. Maybe the story doesn’t convey at all what it’s like to have any of these things. Perhaps foolishly, I’ve counted on this novel to represent something closer to reality. Still, I feel like I’ve been led down the path of memoir.

My options are to blame myself for this transgression or to blame the author. As easy as it would be to blame Nunez, after my experience with Knausgaard, it’s probably time I start taking more responsibility for my role. She calls it a novel right there on the cover. Why do I read it as memoir?

Reading autofiction as memoir might be my default mode, but there are rare occasions when an autofiction writer pulls me out my reading approach. Rachel Cusk’s Outline, the first in her series of autofiction works, aspires to a level of transcendence I don’t typically associate with autofiction. Instead of relying on the sense that she’s offering me a peek at her life, Cusk uses a story that feels memoir-like to tell us something deeper about life in a way I associate with the best fiction.

On the first page of the narrative, Cusk’s protagonist “Faye”—who much like Cusk is a published fiction writer of some renown—has lunch at a London pub with a billionaire. She wonders what the billionaire might want with her attention. She writes, “A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it.” Like most autofiction titles, Cusk lures us in with a scene straight out of the Lifestyles of the Writerly Rich and Famous. She’s sitting at a London pub having lunch with a billionaire and discussing writing. The writing aspect barely even matters. A billionaire is just plain old rich and famous. We’re given a window into a world that, on some level, many non-billionaires like me are interested in.

Then Cusk drops on us this aphorism worthy of Jane Austen about buying your way into becoming a writer. It’s not the kind of line I associate with Knausgaard or Nunez. She’s using our interest in a life in which we have some curiosity and makes a hard turn toward the ineffable, offering us some wry commentary that abandons the more pedestrian voyeurism I typically get from autofiction. She’s telling us about the world in a way I associate with novelists from the literary past. She’s not, when it comes down to it, writing autofiction. She’s writing fiction in the more classic, traditional sense of Austen et al. and merely using the trappings of autofiction to lure us in.

This assessment is backed up by the rest of Outline. Faye is visiting Greece to teach a creative writing seminar in English, and she meets Ryan, another teacher in the program, at a café. Again, we’re privy to the conversation of elites in their field. Ryan has a book contract and a lecturer position in his hometown of Dublin, and he’s engaged to be married. His coming nuptials don’t keep him from leering at their waitress, and he even suggests he and Faye might like to go for a swim together later. We’re meant to notice, if not Ryan’s bad behavior, its portents in his actions and words. It’s impossible not to wonder, is this what it’s like to be flown in to teach at one of these writing seminars in an exotic location? Are these writer-teacher-men taking advantage of the situation to play around? Welcome to Lifestyles of the Writerly Rich and Famous!

But Cusk doesn’t settle for such easy sentiments. They’re merely the trailer that gets you to see the movie. Ryan has a brother of roughly the same age who has a mental condition. The brother bounces back and forth between their parents’ home and care institutions. Ryan says that his parents don’t take much pride in Ryan’s achievements, any more than they take blame for his brother’s condition. Cusk writes, “What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.” Who, on some level, can’t relate to an obsession with our failures and having to constantly convince ourselves of our successes? Cusk is not merely passing along a gossipy scene featuring the bad behavior of a professional. She’s offering genuine insights into life, which much of autofiction seems intent on forgoing. This passage strikes me as hard-won wisdom that extends far beyond the hoi polloi of the literary set. At moments like these, Cusk’s work transcends the surface concerns of life and offers something more relevant to our souls. That’s not a decision most autofiction writers typically make, or can make. They’re more likely to rely on the sense of memoir to ensure reader engagement.

Cusk makes such decisions again and again in her work. Later, on something of a date with another rich man—again of questionable character—Faye describes the relationship of her two sons and the way it changed during the time leading up to her divorce from their father. The boys loved each other unconditionally until they started focusing too much on facts to settle grievances. Cusk writes, “[W]hen peace becomes war, when love turns to hate, something is borne into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.” What started as a conversation between two people about the struggles of marriage and family dovetails into insights about not just love and hatred, but their pronounced effects on the world. Cusk might start where many autofiction writers make their hay, but she has different goals, and she succeeds at making her story bigger than itself. I’m not wondering whether Cusk herself is divorced or has children or had a date with a man in Greece. I don’t much care. I’m thinking about individual love and hatred writ large. That’s not typically where I go when reading autofiction.

The sense of fiction, as opposed to memoir, in Outline is backed up by the many conversations between characters in the book. The lengths of the conversations in particular feel exaggerated to me, to the point that I’m never left wondering if the conversation actually happened. One conversation occurs between Faye, Patoinis, and Angeliki in a restaurant in Athens. Patoinis, a divorced father, tells a long story about a trip with his kids into the mountains that goes awry, and he expresses regret about his divorce from their mother, suggesting it’s why his children eventually left him and emigrated to America. Angeliki has none of it.

“[W]hat are you saying? That your children emigrated because their parents got divorced? My friend, I’m afraid you’re mistaken for thinking you’re that important. Children leave or stay depending on their ambitions: their lives are their own. Somehow we’ve become convinced that if we say even a word out of place, we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and [it] is rooted in our own desires. For instance, my mother thinks that the greatest misfortune is to be an only child. She simply cannot accept that my son will not have brother and sisters, and I’m afraid I’ve given her the impression that this situation has not come about by choice, as a way to avoid talking to her about it all the time. But she’s always telling me about this doctor or that doctor she’s just heard of, who can work miracles; the other day…”

The dialog is penetrating. I’m fascinated by how much parents might impact their children, how mine might have impacted me, and the ridiculousness of the idea of a perfect life. Cusk’s insights are impacting my beliefs as I read, literally changing them as the sentences unravel, but one thing I never believe is that this conversation actually happened.

This is not a criticism of the work. Faye, Patoinis, and Angeliki are all fascinatingly drawn characters, but they talk in a way that suggests artifice. Their individual contributions to the conversation go on for extended periods. No one seems capable of interrupting the other, and the entire conversation is over 40 pages. I can appreciate a good dinner conversation, but this isn’t typically how they go.

Cusk’s dialog reminds me of the film My Dinner with Andre. I loved this film, felt like it changed my DNA when I originally saw it, but despite its verisimilitude, I knew it was art, something manipulated to make me feel a certain way. We’re not eavesdropping on a real conversation. We’re listening to finely wrought dialog that gets beyond eavesdropping to the matters that affect us beyond the covers of a book. That’s what Cusk is doing. Is the book about Cusk’s real life? Did this happen? Who cares?

To me, Cusk doesn’t write autofiction. She writes what decades ago would’ve simply been called semi-autobiographical fiction, or roman a clef. She relies on the feel of a memoir only to the point that this choice allows you into her work, and once you’re there, she transcends the form by offering aphorisms and insights that help the reader understand people and life. “Will you buy the next installment of this story?” is a less important question than “Are you getting something valuable from this one?”

I understand why Knausgaard, Nunez, and Cusk write autofiction. They choose a form with decades of history as a compelling means to communicate story to readers. On the surface, writing autofiction is a fantastic choice for engaging readers like me. You seemingly write about your personal life and feelings much the same way someone writes memoir. The fictional form allows you, consciously or otherwise, to adjust the narrative to make the story more compelling—so long as you avoid making it feel too much like fiction—and you don’t go out of your way to interrupt your audience’s impression that they’re reading memoir. In the end, you’ve done your first job as a book writer, which is to engage your reader. If there’s a sin in this process, it’s a forgivable one.

Still, autofiction veers the reader’s attention away from the more metaphorical aspects of story as typically practiced in fiction writing and, like a memoir, places more focus on whether what happens in the story actually happened in real life. In this way, the story goes from being about a protagonist to being about a real person, but the reader has different expectations for stories about real people, one of which is that the things that happen in the story seem like real life.