Memoir, Autofiction, and What Lies Between

If I'm making up the framework, does that fictionalize the facts?

Happy Autumn!

I’ve spent most of the summer trying to finish my 15-year opus about my father and our family. With that prospect comes the question of what to call it. I’m not talking about the title but the category, or genre. This is an issue that bedevils many writers at some point— I know it’s a perennial concern for my students. So I thought it might be a good topic to return to in this newsletter.

Whether you’re a writer or reader, I hope this essay below ignites some new thoughts about the next memoir or novel you write or read!

Thanks — always — for reading.

Cheers!

Aimee

---

When does nonfiction become fiction, and why does it matter?

For years I’ve referred to the book I’m now writing as a “family memoir.” It’s about my father’s deathbed request for a missing box— and the secrets unearthed in my quest to find and interpret that box. The story is true, but I’ve also made up narrative elements for the book. Lines of dialogue. The chronology of discovery. An occasional pseudonym. Does that mean I’m writing fiction? Or, more specifically, autobiographical fiction or autofiction?

The distinction between memoir and autofiction is neither clear nor consistently recognized in the publishing industry, but it’s an important concern because it impacts how a book will be marketed by agents and publishers, shelved by bookstores, and interpreted by readers. Memoirs are sold alongside biographies and are read as factual accounts. When a memoirist is on book tour, she’ll be expected to talk about her story as it actually happened in her life. By contrast, when a novelist talks about her book, she typically discusses her research or writing process or inspiration. Fiction readers may quibble with authors about the accuracy of technical, cultural, or historical details, but they (mostly) accept that the characters and plot are imagined.

In workshops I’ve led on this subject, I’ve always come down on the side of subjective truth as the final arbiter: if the story tells the author’s own truth about the main subjects, core events to the best of her recollection, and the true significance of those events, it can be classified as memoir. So long as the fictionalized details are minor— the color of a dress, say, or the day of the week something happened, or exactly where an incident took place — truth is flexible and readers are understanding. No one’s memory is comprehensive enough to report with 100% accuracy every objective moment of life.

But memoirists also have the option of presenting their true story as fiction — even when it reads very much like nonfiction. In the 1970s French writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky coined the term autofiction for his own thinly-veiled narration of his marital and extramarital activities. Since then, autofiction has become increasingly popular, with major literary awards going to practitioners like Marguerite Duras (The Lover), Sheila Heti (Motherhood), Rachel Cusk (Outline), and Karl Knausgaard (Spring).

According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, autofiction is often a kind of life writing that allows writers to focus closely on particular traumas, relationships, or aspects of experience while at the same time cultivating a degree of emotional or narrative distance:

Autofictional techniques can be used to allow writers to appear as minor characters in narratives that are not ostensibly about them, to activate this testimonial function. In another variation, writers narrate historical incidents that occurred before they were born but which nevertheless concern their community, ancestry, or family. Since these cannot be entirely separated from the life story of the author, to tell the story of those ancestors is also, in a meaningful sense, to narrate an aspect of one’s own history: autofiction at one remove.

Judgment call

The fictional veneer can serve a protective function for the writer, as it insulates her from judgment against the actions or decisions of her protagonist. This protection applies to criticism from the public, if not necessarily from family and personal friends; Serge Doubrovsky’s autofiction was so transparently factual about his adultery that it prompted his wife to kill herself.

Publisher Brooke Warner, writing in Publishers Weekly last year, pointed out that the judgment stakes differ significantly for male and female authors:

“Readers and critics alike love to judge memoirists for their behavior rather than the work itself, and women who write memoir are more maligned than the men who do.”

Warner went on to describe the release from personal attack that memoirists like Rachel Cusk experienced when they began framing their lived experience as fiction. When writing memoirs, Cusk was “eviscerated by readers who took issue with her exploration of truth—how she wrote candidly about maternal ambivalence and the breakdown of her marriage,” yet when Cusk explored the same issues in her Outline Trilogy, she was praised as a master of fictional storytelling.

The problem with telling a true story as fiction is that it opens the door to disbelief. If the author doesn’t own the truth of the story, why should the reader? A ripping good novel can deliver a certain kind of truth, but it’s not believed in the same way as a story that the writer tells you she lived through. To a large degree, that’s because fiction readers tend to want something very different than nonfiction readers.

Having written both novels (on Asian American themes) and memoirs (about eating disorders) I can see this distinction in my own readers. Those who read my novels want to be enchanted, to fall under a captivating spell. They’re delighted if they learn something about a different culture or part of the world or human relationship, but they mostly just want to be transported emotionally out of their own lived experience. My job as novelist is to deliver a great story and a good read. In contrast, readers of my nonfiction are looking for candor about true experiences that parallel their own and that persuade them they can rely on my insights and expertise on the issues addressed in the book. My job as memoirist is to personally earn their confidence and deliver a good read.

What about fictionalized memoir?

But just as autofiction has risen as a new variant of the novel, “fictionalized memoir” has emerged as a new way of constructing true narratives. My favorite example of this is Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a book that the author’s note describes as “not a history but a portrait or 'gesture'.” Ondaatje imagines certain scenes on the page with a touch of magic realism. He also collapses three return trips to his homeland, Sri Lanka, into a loose structure that reads as a single long visit. But the book includes photographs, tombstone quotes, and other specific autobiographical details along with more speculative family lore. And poetry.

There’s no poetry in my book, but from the start I’ve taken many of the same liberties and observed similar constraints as Ondaatje. The engine that drives Running in the Family is Ondaatje’s search for understanding, the desire to make sense of the father he barely knew so that he can make sense of himself. Ditto for me. And I, too, have adapted the chronology of real events and condensed the process of discovery and interpretation.

As long as I was faithful to that quest for understanding, I thought, as long as the facts unearthed at the end are literally true, and as long as I acknowledged the rule-bending in an author’s note at the end of the book, I could continue to call my project a memoir.

Now, I’m no longer so sure. What’s changed? It’s a question of degrees. As I started revising the first draft of my memoir, I needed to fictionalize more of the transitional “glue” that holds the narrative together. Before, I made up conversations that might have happened or else shifted the order, timing, or location of discussions I clearly remember. Now I’m making up conversations I know never happened, simply to serve the pace and accessibility of the narrative. I’m putting words in family members’ mouths that they never spoke alongside those that they did. And that’s what now makes me wonder if I’ve pushed the memoir envelope into another genre.

Truth is the bottom line

“It’s always the writer’s prerogative,” Warner asserts, “to decide whether to bill their work as memoir or fiction.” The bottom line when making this decision is the nature of truth that the author aims to convey.

A few clarifying questions:

• Do the fictional changes and additions distort the core story’s inherent truth?

• Does the fictionalization alter the meaning of the story’s events and revelations?

• Is it important that readers know the story literally happened to the author?

• Is it important that readers have a factual context for elements like archival materials and photographs in the book?

The annals of publishing are full of fake memoirs whose fictionalization obliterated their original truth. James Frey could successfully have published A Million Little Pieces as a novel, but after trying to pass off this exaggerated account of his drug addiction and imprisonment as a memoir, he became a national pariah. Other scheduled publications have been canceled when editors discovered that authors were fabricating whole and essential chunks of their stories. These writers blew their chances of publication because they believed that memoirs sell better than novels.

What matters when making this genre decision is not what “sells” but what the essential truth of the story demands. To fictionalize the framing device is very different than fictionalizing the facts that are being framed. And that’s where I find myself drawing the line for my book.

I’m writing about the facts of my family and the secrets that I unearthed in the wake of my father’s death. I need to describe these facts as honestly and turthfully as possible. I need my readers to understand that the quest for answers described in this book has been genuine. And I need to present a great deal of archival evidence to make my case. None of that will be fictionalized. The only liberties I do take involve the organization, chronology, and process of deduction that led me to the conclusions that I make about my father and the secrets he kept hidden. Those liberties I think I can sum up for the reader in my author’s note, as Ondaatje did. So, for now, I’m choosing to embrace the concept of fictionalized memoir.

But who knows? Perhaps by the time my book is published there will be a whole new category for these genre-straddling conundrums. I take comfort in the seeming willingness of publishing’s gatekeepers to blur the lines. Witness the New York Times review of Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman’s 2011 chronicle of grief, as a “passionate and moving autobiographical novel (or fictionalized memoir, depending on your bias).”

Just keep writing, I tell myself now as I’ve always told my students. Make it as true as you possibly can using whatever tools you need to do that. Don’t worry about genre until it’s ready to sell.

---