Autofiction

And why no one can actually read any more

Normal People by Sally Rooney

You will have read this one, or seen the programme on TV, so I need not detain you with the characters or the plot. Instead, if I may, I’d like to think a little about what critics and the judging panels of prizes like to call ‘autofiction’ — fiction drawn very heavily from life, inspired significantly by one’s own life, or (now words have lost all meaning) in some way seeming realer than real, and like what might happen in a real life, to many readers.

I don’t like this term. I’m sure most writers whose works are classified as autofiction don’t like it either. It’s ridiculous. And for many writers, who would like to get a little credit for invention (for actually being able to come up with stories of their own once every so often), it must be maddening.

And, if you really think about it for a second, the last thing I included in my list above means almost nothing. Something that seems as if it really happened is just good writing, good writing of any kind. Fantastical or real, fake or bio- or autobio-graphical. Science fiction, fantasy, grotty novel of London scuzz. Whatever.

Even a book which appears to be written about you or the people you know is simply a good book. Just something well-observed. Not something that definitely happened and was culled from someone or other’s diary.

William Boyd, for instance, has said that he’s one of those writers who actually makes things up. Few people seem to believe him when he says that. People accuse him at various times of having stolen this or that thing from an event in his own life, or from someone else’s.

Or they ask him when, precisely, he did time in that concentration camp or sought treatment from a psychoanalyst in turn of the century Austria. And while Boyd says he is occasionally flattered that someone might inquire of him, for instance, when he lived in Manila to be able to write Blue Afternoon (he’d never even visited), it must also drive him to distraction.

The idea that every scandalous or strange or awful thing in the book must have happened to the author — or that everything present in a story of yours must indicate your own revealed preferences, be it for blond men or for illegal drugs or uncommon sexual practices — gives writers of fiction no credit at all.

As if they are merely enigmas to be decoded by readers through the breadcrumbs left in their works. It’s a ridiculous delusion, but one many readers seem to share.

Hence ‘autofiction,’ a category so baggy and shapeless it covers Karl Ove Knausgard’s explicitly autobiographical series, My Struggle, and Ian McEwan’s penultimate novel Lessons, and, of course, Normal People, the entirety of which is simply assumed to have happened to Sally Rooney or to someone she knew. The same with her previous work Conversations with Friends.

How much of it ‘actually happened,’ as some readers love to imagine? Perhaps some, perhaps none, but that does not matter.

Some stand-up comedians have said publicly that occasionally, in their acts, they recite a long piece of Shakespeare or just do sums in their heads, just to prove to their audience occasionally that this is an act and that they’re not just riffing and making it up on the spot. When comedians say this, it once struck me almost as neurotic and snobbish. Surely, I thought, the pretence is that they are just riffing. Why complain if someone gets conned and successfully buys in?

Some comedians like Ricky Gervais have said they need the audience to be awed by them in another way, not just entertained. That strikes me as insane vanity.

But nowadays, I understand it. Being misunderstood, and therefore insulted by implication, is no fun.

The same thoughts must occur to someone like Sally Rooney, who became so famous so young, and who was — in quite a bizarre and I would say disrespectful way — associated with the lives of her characters. Because her books were about sad young people with fairly pyrotechnic romantic lives, there was all sorts of strange prurient speculation about them in the papers. More so, I think, when the TV series of Normal People and Conversations with Friends (which I confess I haven’t seen) were so popular on TV.

One of the downsides of the supposed autofiction trend is how easily observers fall into traps of their own. They think that because something they’ve read or saw on TV seems as though it happened to a real person, they could simply write up stuff they personally did or experienced, or otherwise heard about. (The author of ‘Cat Person,’ a boring New Yorker story that became a film I didn’t see and a massive plagiarism controversy, may have suffered for the same idea.)

I spent quite a lot of the past year writing 500 words per day of autofiction about someone who was a little like me, and I wrote short dialogues about a man being interviewed who slowly over a hundred or so thousand words turned into me, and I can tell you two things. One, it’s very, very easy to write about yourself or things you remember. No wonder most books in America are autobiographies, even the books that pretend not to be. And two, everything I wrote in that vein was terrible.

As the late Tom Stoppard is claimed to have said, just because it’s true, that does not mean it’s interesting. Most memoirs are boring. Most autofiction must be boring, too, by the same token. If such a thing even exists.