Anna's Autofiction: A Genre In-between
“Autofiction came to us as part of the language (of) commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the read and the invented.” –Christian Lorentzen
What is autofiction? Autofiction is a literature genre that combines elements of autobiography and fiction. With autofiction, the facts are blended with fictional information. It is referred to as a “genre in-between” as it touches two literary forms, autobiography and fiction.
Many authors are using autofiction to write their personal stories. Instead of conventional, first-person narration, they write their stories from the third person perspective, exchanging memory gaps with fiction. The reader enjoys not just a glimpse of the author’s life, but the author’s personal feelings on what their life could have been.
Autofiction has been a writing style for a long time without too much emphasis being put upon it.
1. Be Brief and Tell Them Everything by Brad Listi
A truly touching story of a struggling writer who is coming to an understanding about personal obstacles in his family. It documents the stops and starts of adulthood and marriage, and the joys and challenges of parenting, while defining what it means to be a good man, and a good writer.
2. Outline, Transit, Kudos a trilogy by Rachel Cusk
A trilogy that is considered to be "among the most important written in this century so far (Globe and Mail). These stories follow one woman’s journey through tragedies and the people that help her to see merit in suffering, fear that accompanies change, and the hope of new possibilities that springs from it. Brilliant and startling insights into facing great loss and the trauma of change.
3. All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui
A novel that has been described as intense, gorgeous, troubling, and seductive, it details a woman’s idyllic childhood through her young adult life into violence and emotional despair. Thought-provoking, it will have you asking why we see ourselves as we do, and that we survive this world merely by being there for one another… to know and to become.
4. My Struggle, Book One, My Struggle, Book Two, My Struggle, Book Three by Karl Ove Knausgaard
A provocative and brilliant book, published in 2009, is the first in a series of books in which the author outlined the “banalities and humiliations of his life.” Private pleasures and dark thoughts covered within unleashed a media frenzy upon release, with journalists attempting to identify mentioned family members.