Never mind that Heti herself dislikes the term, as do most writers tarred with the same brush. And never mind that nothing new ever seems to come of it. We still replay the same irritating questions again and again with the pleasure of a serial killer returning to the scene of the crime.
We ask: is it memoir? Autobiographical fiction? Creative nonfiction—whatever that is? The last refuge of disillusioned MFA students? Or is it simply a marketing term? All writers use their lives. People keep sending me these autobiographical novels to review! This is the point of marketing—to find new terms for old and familiar mysteries, terms that disguise those mysteries so we mistake them for something novel.
Autofiction is, after all, a term that originated in the blurb on the back of a s French novel. We must admit that we were primed to believe in what we were told made autofiction unique. The books came to us with set-ups we recognized from our lives on the Internet but had yet to find in novels.
We learned to talk about ourselves so we could really talk about the world, or to talk about the world so we could really talk about ourselves. We learned how to be an author and a character simultaneously.
But I really did have that question, how should a person be. These unanswered questions are what make discussions of autofiction a magnetic topic in the miniature world of literary fiction.
