who cares if first novels are secretly about the author's life?

real-life footage of me putting a gun in the mouth of autofiction discourse

The first writing workshop I ever took was a short story class when I was 25. The class ran late, past 9pm. When I think of that time, I think of my dad picking me up in the January dark, the two of us winding in silence through Rock Creek Park.

I had two poorly researched historical novels under my creative belt by then, a short story about someone getting dementia that for some reason involved Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and a half-finished novel inspired by this guy I sort-of dated that turned into a mystery midway through. What I’m saying is, I entered that workshop with no clue what the fuck was going on.

The first story I put up for workshop was based on a date I’d gone on the previous fall. In memory, the night unfurled like an infinite hallway runner—to reach the café where we were meeting, I walked an hour in the waning sunlight, briefly slinking into a nearby liquor store for a miniature rum that, on the filthy sidewalk, I tipped into my piña colada Snapple.

My date and I paraded around the city: to a dingy restaurant serving bagged Thanksgiving meals, a dim velvety bar, a Mediterranean spot we got takeout from to eat in his car. Rum-tipsy, I read him a Tracy K. Smith poem while he peed on the side of the road. We wound up at a house party, throwing back White Claws.

At the end of the night, I grabbed a spare napkin from his glove compartment, held it up to his mouth. “Spit out your gum,” I said and kissed him. I thought I was in a Richard Linklater film.

The next morning, I transcribed the night. It wasn’t a story, but a bulk of clay that needed carving, shaping. I didn’t understand story then, only moments that flared red like patches on a heat map, an instinct to follow that heat.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing like getting ripped a new asshole in a room full of people.

The comment from workshop that juts out to me now came from an older woman. “So the protagonist goes home with him on the first date? I don’t believe that,” she said.

Another woman, possibly the same one, added, “Honestly, this just feels like a story about a boring, uneventful date.”

I might’ve cried on the ride home, I can’t remember. What I do remember is this was the only, the only, time I ever considered giving up writing.¹

Now, I see that—even though this feedback wasn’t constructive—my story was bad. A story requires more than transcribing life. But this doesn’t mean life is not worthy material for a story. The problem wasn’t that I wrote about my experience, it was that I didn’t use narrative tools to spin it into a compelling story.

There’s a criticism often leveled against young or female (or both) writers whose first novels are based on their lives, casting it as expected, unrigorous, too easy.

Well, I’m in the mood to feed a gun into that argument’s big mouth.

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A few weeks ago, I was reading critic Andrea Long Chu’s piece on Zadie Smith’s authorial evolution in Vulture. The following line came early on:

“Critics celebrated her [Smith] for breaking “the iron rule that first fictions should be thin slices of autobiography, served dripping with self-pity,” even as the author’s biographical details — her age (24), her race (Jamaican mother, white father), her looks (good) — would make her an object of fascination.”

That original review is from 1999. That was 25 years ago, who cares! Shit is diFFeREnT now.

But it called to memory a different, much more recent, comment I read in a major newspaper several years back—a comment I think about often:

“What’s even more remarkable is that [Insert Debut Novel By Very Young Black Female Novelist] isn’t one of those thinly disguised diaries we’ve come to expect from precocious young novelists who can’t think of anything else to write about except their own heartache.”

What??? Did autofiction bully you in middle school or something????

This comment is weird for myriad reasons. One, that strangely snippy can’t think of anything else assumes young people who write about their lives do so because they’re unimaginative and, by implied extension, untalented. Or that older novelists don’t also write about their lives. Or that (see: thinly disguised diaries), writers are protectively hunched over a sheaf of papers trying to hide the detritus of personal experience that’s fallen into their novels when, if a novel is autobiographical, we only know this with certainty because an author has said as much.

And maybe I’m an idiot, but I actually don’t know the difference between autobiographical novels and other novels beyond the obvious: the former steals its material from life in ways the author has alerted the reader to and the latter steals its material from life in ways the author has not alerted the reader to.

Am I missing something?

Also: what rises to the level of autobiography? If the protagonist and author share a job title, birthday, a hometown is that autobiographical fiction even if their stories don’t align? Brandon Taylor once said he gave Wallace, the protagonist of Real Life, his surface-level identity traits (gay, Black, former science PhD candidate in a Midwestern college town) so he could focus on other things that were more interesting to him as an artist.

When we say a novel is autobiographical, are we saying the events of the novel hew closely to the events of the author’s life, even if names, dates, details have been changed? What if the protagonist shares the author’s actual name, as in Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (Which is a self-proclaimed Novel From Life). What makes a novel from life versus a novel from imagination? Isn’t all fiction an indiscernible blend of stuff from life and from the writer’s imagination?? Wtf am I missing?!?!

(Haili is humoring this struggle to define exactly what’s meant by autobiographical fiction when her real point is who the fuck cares)

If a story based on an author’s heartbreak is uncompelling, it’s not uncompelling because it’s a story based on an author’s heartbreak. It’s uncompelling because this heartbreak is poorly executed as a story.

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I recently finished Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain which, to my knowledge, draws upon Greenwell’s own experience being hospitalized for an aortic rupture. I don’t know how much of the narrative is based on his life, how much is fictionalized. But this novel seemed to be a meaningful site of sense-making for Greenwell following the senseless experiences of sudden illness after decades of good health, of isolation during Covid, experiences which deeply trouble one’s self-concept. How is that endeavor—moving towards these kinds of experiences by assigning language to them—not what art-making, if not art itself, is about?

These criticisms of autofiction appear to rise from the assumption that writers write for others—critics, readers—when in reality, I think most writers write for ourselves, if not entirely, at least fundamentally. We are our first audience, our primary critic. We write to work out on paper what we struggle to work out away from it. And it isn’t about writing what you know. Just because I’m a Black woman doesn’t mean I ‘know what it means’ to be one—its’s not a flat, unchanging existence. How much do we actually know about what’s happened to us without the scaffolding of story? How much do we know about ourselves without a reflective surface against which to observe it, be it a mirror, be it language?

I think writers write towards what we want to know. We write into the void of a question. Many of us are a question to ourselves that we want answered, regardless of if our literal selves are the subject of our work or not. Because, let’s be clear, when we write what fascinates, disturbs, obsesses us, we’re writing about ourselves. Parts of our biography are present simply in the subjects we choose.

And maybe you’re writing autofiction because you’re tired of reading novels in which you’re lived experienced is absent. Or dully rendered. Or peripheral.

The other week, I stumbled upon part of a lecture delivered by Claudia Rankine described in one of Alexander Chee’s post:

“The talk was on new methods for documenting “the poetics of being,” and how some “modes of (auto)biographical practice recapture the complexities of lives that have been flattened by narratives framed by historical trauma.” Many of us there, if not all of us, needed this.”

But: this is probably not a problem white male critic #4,505 is concerned with.

No, let’s instead celebrate these young Black female novelists, not simply for stories well-executed on a craft-level (as we do for white novelists). Let’s applaud them for not writing about their lives when there’s so much more important matters at hand. Because, to be honest—and we would never say this—who fucking cares about their lives anyway?

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There’s this odd preoccupation with how difficult, or not difficult, it is to perform a particular creative act. It’s not hard to write a commercial romance and so…You didn’t actually make up that thing that happened in your novel and so…

And so…what? What’s meant to follow this accusation? And so it’s not…good? And so…who fucking cares?

The idea that the creative labor expended in making up a novel from so-called scratch is more legitimate than that involved in making one drawn from life is stupid. Where does this logic leave memoirists? Biographers? Is the work of sculpting reams of solid, fixed material into the shape of a story not hard? As if the hardest part of writing is figuring out where a person is from, what happened to them in the 7th grade, rather than how to telegraph this information to the reader? As evidenced by all the people who feel passionately that they have a book idea—just because you know the story doesn’t mean you know how to tell it.

And just because the material is preexisting doesn’t mean its structure is a given. As Megan O’Rourke recently wrote² about her nonfiction book The Invisible Kingdom, finding the best way to tell a story is difficult work:

“…it couldn’t be the story of dramatic overcoming of illness, because I was writing about uncertainty and the kind of illness that doesn’t resolve. But without structure, the book would have been unreadable; the experience I was writing about was anti-dramatic, an experience of repetitive pain and suffering. I needed something that would carry the reader through. So what would it be? I was able to write The Invisible Kingdom when I finally realized it was an account of setting aside one idea for another. I wasn’t writing about getting better. I was writing about letting go of an initial, deeply held goal…in order to to think differently about disease—more fiercely, more honestly, more clearly—in a society that was pathologically uninterested in my experience.”

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I’ve been using the word “steal” to talk about the real life details found in autofiction, but that isn’t quite right. Your life is there to be used in your art as you wish.³ It’s not robbery. Or rather, all writing involves some kind of plunder—from your emotional life, from other writers, from what you’ve read, watched, heard. Writing isn’t a pure act. Our words, characters, settings, are wrung from some patchwork cloth. There are experiences that are too domineering, too consuming—grief, love, desire, illness, heartache—to not filter into the work whether we intend for it to or not. What’s juvenile about being concerned with the people, communities, questions closest to you?

I didn’t feel like wading through all the autofiction discourse online to write this post, but I did read this New York Times essay called “Our Autofiction Fixation” by Jessica Winter.⁴ I love the way she talks about the chasm between the self that writes the book and the self forced to go back and understand what’s been written:

“To dig a book out of the ground can be backbreaking, hand-tearing work; you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from or who will recognize it as belonging to them, too. And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you.”

1. BUT Y’ALL CAN’T BREAK MY SOUL!!!!!!!!

2. omg I promise I read more than substack posts lolllll

3. I mean prepare to be possibly sued but also maybe not!

4. Winter also talks about the growing trend of writers being encouraged to lean into the autobiographical details in their novels for marketing and publicity purposes