Autofiction is Ruining My Life
Why reading might not make you a better person
I took a class my senior year of college called “Global Literary Studies.” It was a course in the Comparative Literature Department, taught by a tenured professor who specialized in French Renaissance Studies. It was unclear why he was teaching this course as it had nothing to do with France or the Renaissance.
Rather, each day of class was dedicated to a different canonical text of 20th and 21st century theory: Benjamin, Marx, Barthes, Adorno, etc. While the course was advertised as “Global,” we failed to read anyone outside of the West, save Gayatri Spivak. Three times a week we had 65 minutes to digest the work of one of these figures, although we rarely did. The professor preferred to spend class either chatting with other students in French, which I do not speak, or asking us, in English, what made us a “minority” on campus. In the rare event we did address the reading, the professor would remark, “I’ve read this piece one hundred times and still cannot understand it! Beautiful writing, though.” He would then ask Hannah, a Comparative Literature major in the class with a Lacan sticker on her laptop, to explain the piece.
We were graded on two short papers, the only instructions being to use at least one of the texts from class. For the final, I wrote a paper titled “Function of the I in Contemporary Autofiction,” in which I borrowed from Lacan’s writing on the Mirror Stage to explore the literary obsession with autofiction in recent years.
At its most basic, autofiction is a blend of autobiography and fiction. The plot is hyper-realistic. The author is typically a woman. Length? Shorter than most. It’s published by a respected, yet niche, imprint. And most importantly, all autofiction texts are written in the first person: “I” populates each page with an almost tyrannical authority. In autofiction, the protagonist of the novel operates as a double of the author themself. Many novels go as far as to have both names be the same, if the “character” is named at all. Here, reality is a slippery entity — unstable and highly fictionalized, just not always where you’d expect it to be.
Weather (2020) by Jenny Offill is a prime example of autofiction. Weather follows the life of Lizzie — a mother, wife, and failed graduate student who contemplates the micro and macro changes of weather in both her public and private worlds (familial structure, late-stage capitalism, middle age, the climate crisis, motherhood, etc.). Offill writes not so much a plot-based narrative, but short, scattered paragraphs of prose poems with the 2016 U.S. election at its fulcrum. For her, incomplete sentences are not shoddy editing, but technique: “It’s the first day of spring, weird clouds, hazy sun. Henry is doing that looping thing he does.” Sometimes dialogue is contained within quotation marks, sometimes it’s strewn around the page in italics. Offill writes in somber aphorisms which read as though they’re doing intense cultural work, but are actually meaningless: “Lately, I’ve observed that I dress like the kids on campus or maybe they dress like me”; “Funny how when you’re married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you’re anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed”; “The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.”
I received an email from my professor on New Year's Eve, subject line “Happy New Year,” 6 weeks after the quarter had ended. Attached were notes for my paper. He wrote:
A. Your paper is an interesting read, and you made a gallant attempt to “use” Lacan’s mirror stage as a critical framework for reading contemporary American auto fiction. I’ve pointed out aspects of your reading in which you seem to have an inexact understanding of his theory. For the class, I would have been very happy to give you an A if you had been a consistent and engaged participant in our classroom discussions. Most of the time, I had the impression that you were typing away and looking at materials that had nothing to do with what we were discussing. Good luck with your thesis, and I hope that you learned something in our class that will be useful to you in your writing.
He honestly wasn’t wrong. I wanted to write about autofiction so I picked the reading which got out of my way most quickly. In my paper I wrote, “When considering the trend of autofiction within contemporary literary fiction, it’s interesting to think alongside the writing of psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan.” It is not really that interesting.
I mused, “The act of writing a piece of autofiction rehearses similar psychoanalytic processes as the pre-social child discovering subjecthood through looking into the mirror.” Perhaps. But neither the professor nor I really knew psychoanalysis well enough to make that call.
In service to the point, however, let’s run with the idea that the authors of contemporary autofiction are not unlike Lacan’s baby, staring in the mirror, “fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze.” The writer-as-baby peers into their reflection, the thing that they are not, to form their understanding of subjecthood, the thing they are. In short, the character validates the author’s existence, even though their every movement is determined by the author themself.
Writers, like Offill, are figuring out who they are, and how to be, through their own autofiction. It is unfortunate, then, that who they turn out to be is quite lackluster.
In Weather, Offill’s character is very worried about the world. Natural disasters, Trump’s presidency. Yet, nothing really happens in Weather. She walks her son to school, she researches books on the French Resistance and fascism. As a reader who understands the logics of autofiction, we grasp that Offill is also very worried about the world. Rising tides, democratic erosion. She, too, worries her search-history will get her “flagged by some evil government algorithm.”
The character and her author anguish about most everything and do very little beyond “working on themselves.” They read or write a book to soothe their anxieties. They take notice of the singularities of daily existence. The period after Trump’s election was certainly a paralyzing and fragmented time. Yet, it was also a moment of rupture and mobilization. How depressing, then, that one of the more popular pieces of U.S. fiction detailing this moment offers nothing of the latter.
Autofiction, in all its formal possibilities, engages in a succession of fantasies in which a subject, the writer, observes and creates their “Ideal I,” their fictionalized self. It believes in bourgeois interiority, the making of the modern self: it is memoir in literary fiction’s clothing. It is a way, in the 21st century, to sneak your diary next to a Sally Rooney book on the shelf (which is also, I might add, a diary.) And that’s okay. I recently re-read my journals from high school and I think, if I removed some of the angst, there could be something there. Most people want to make a narrative out of their life; they want to look back and see the contours of an arc that was probably never there. The issue is, however, that readers seem to think autofiction is doing something really profound and important for art.
Offill cultivates sentiment, what the NYT calls “unbearable emotional intensity,” through her patented fragmented form, commitment to simple detail, and intimacy of first-person. We really feel what the character, who is also the author, feels. It’s beautiful and it’s heartbreaking and it could mean whatever we’d like it to. There is an affective currency to autofiction that allows the reader to look past the uninspired politics of the novel. If we all get together and feel the intimacies of life, then life will be better, right?
However, Offill does not simply disregard critique or tangible action in favor of style: she presents shifty politics of individualism and self-betterment packaged around pretty proverbs. She seems to believe that reading a book of lovely words, preferably her book of lovely words, will make the world a better place. Writing a book that externalizes and validates her existence, devoid of any real politics beyond Trump and climate change are bad, will make everything better.
I had a professor who used to ask us why everything had to use words like “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” to prove a point. She made a slideshow about why critique was brash and artless. She seemed to have forgotten the entire ouvré of Toni Morrison. She was also college roommates with Jenny Offill.
What I’m trying to say is this: aesthetic and affective literary style does not always equal good politics, even when it pretends to. Reading a book with pretty words won’t make you a better person. It’s time to be Lacan’s baby, look in the mirror, and realize: AUTOFICTION IS RUINING YOUR LIFE.