Autofiction

Autofiction is a genre that occupies the deliberately unstable ground between autobiography and fiction. The term, coined by French writer Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, describes works in which the author uses their own name, biographical details, and lived experiences as the foundation of a narrative that also includes invented, altered, or imaginatively reconstructed elements. Unlike memoir, which promises factual fidelity, and unlike fiction, which promises imaginative freedom, autofiction promises both and neither. It asks the reader to hold two contradictory truths simultaneously: this happened, and this is made up. That productive ambiguity is the form's defining feature and its source of power.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume My Struggle is the most prominent recent example of autofiction, cataloguing the minutiae of the author's life with an almost aggressive commitment to the mundane that paradoxically creates a hypnotic reading experience. Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy strips autofiction to its structural bones: the narrator, a writer clearly modeled on Cusk herself, says almost nothing about her own life while the people around her reveal theirs, creating a portrait by negative space. Ben Lerner's 10:04 plays with the form self-consciously, incorporating the story of its own writing into the narrative and blurring the line between lived experience and literary construction. Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? uses real names and transcribed conversations alongside clearly fictional elements, making the reader's uncertainty about what is real part of the book's subject matter.

Writing autofiction requires a willingness to use your life as material while remaining aware that life and narrative are not the same thing. The form gives you permission to reshape, compress, invent, and restructure your experiences in service of a larger artistic truth. However, this freedom comes with responsibilities: to the real people who may appear in your work, to the reader's trust, and to artistic integrity. The best autofiction is not a lazy shortcut around the hard work of invention but a rigorous exploration of the relationship between experience and storytelling. Begin by identifying the aspects of your experience that feel most charged with meaning, then give yourself permission to treat them as raw material rather than sacred truth. The question is not whether something really happened but whether it is true on the page.