Up top: Writing a newsletter about autofiction is a privilege when there are thousands of people living under apartheid imposed by right wing governments with little respect for life. Here is a good interview to watch in case you’re confused about what’s going on in Palestine and Israel right now, and the very clear steps needed to end the violence.
Over the weekend I threw away one hundred pages of the novel I’m working on and it’s got me feeling invincible, so here’s a ramble about autofiction. If the very mention of the word autofiction bores you or fills you with dread, trust me, you’re in good company here. I hope you’ll read on anyway. And finally, if any of this interests you, I’ve got a queer speculative seminar series starting this week on Zoom called HAUNT YOURSELF, which will be a generative tour through horror and haunting using a trans lens.
The thing is that I, too, feel a creeping horror at the word autofiction, a simultaneous pull toward the material of my life and a reflexive jerk away from too much navel gazing. But—and this is a big But—if I’m writing autofiction, and I admit I am writing it despite the fact that it does not resemble my life in facts, am I admitting to wanting to live a life worth writing about? Is that uniting art and life too much? I guess more and more these days I don’t feel the divide as strongly. Though, if I admit to all of this, then am I also admitting my failure to write an unlikeable character? Because that’s the assumption, isn’t it, that in literary fiction it’s only the unlikeable characters that are interesting or worth writing about. It’s not particularly likeable to be seen wanting to be liked or “good,” regardless of whether you’re a fictional character or not. Or do I have it backwards; should I be more willing to be less likeable? Am I too polite? Am I too nice to those writing and criticizing safely inside and about their academic towers? Such a slim slim measure of society, the academic novel. As if whole micro¯ocosms of life weren’t left out of these supposedly representative settings.
This isn’t an essay about any particular contemporary author or book. If anything, even though I tend to resist writing about professors and graduate students, I am the product of them writing about themselves. Both of my grandparents on my father’s side were novelists and English professors at SUNY Canton and St. Lawrence University, the only two colleges in my hometown. They also both wrote autofictional novels. Her I never knew—she died of breast cancer before I was born, when my dad was about the age I am now. Her husband lived another twenty years without her. When they were both alive, he wrote a novel about a husband and wife with two kids, a boy and a girl (like they had), in a small college town where the husband cheats on his wife; she wrote murder mysteries and, later, while she was sick, a novel about a married woman who falls in love with her oncologist. They were deeply in love.
All of which is to say that writing unlikeable—or at least morally ambiguous—autofictional characters comes with a little more baggage in my family.
Autofiction also implies automatic, as if pulling from the details of one’s life were the only way to write about oneself, as if it were the natural approach. That it’s the FACTS that matter in determining whether or not a story or a novel is autofiction, instead of sensation, feelings, emotions and how you found them. As if there were any emotion universal enough in its rippling origins that two people, fictional or not, could share it.
A better route: film comes not from the Latin but Old English and Germanic root filmen, which means “membrane, thin skin, or foreskin.” But whereas membrana got all mixed up in the slurry between words and the material on which they were printed, by the 1500s filmen had come to refer to “a thin coat of something.” Who knows why the divergence—perhaps the monks were preoccupied with making sure their parchment was so full with authority that it could not be detangled from the material on which it was written. Not enough curiosity goes into the early days when writing and paper were evolving side by side—a medium’s materials should go before its genre, in my opinion. But I digress. It’s easy enough to understand how we got from film as a coating to film as a medium of artistic expression by way of silver colloidal photographic plates which used the coating of the chemical gel on glass negatives to produce the earliest photosensitive prints. Even when “filmmakers” of the twentieth century were no longer performing this delicate dark room dance by themselves, the metaphor stuck of a filmmaker as someone who coats life with meaning.
This is closest to what I strive for when writing anything. In this sense, it doesn’t even matter if what one writes about is true or even remotely close to the details of the writer’s life. It could be argued, of course, that under this definition, every writer is engaging in autofiction, because simply through the act of writing every writer, author, poet etc. is engaged in the honorable attempt to coat their life with meaning. I don’t disagree with that.
Andrea Long Chu sort of gets at this in her recent review of Zadie Smith’s new novel:
“The mid-century literary critic F. R. Leavis once wrote, in his very serious book The Great Tradition, that Austen’s genius was to take ‘certain problems that life compelled on her as personal ones’ and impersonalize them, tracing carefully out of herself and back into the world. What Leavis admired was not that Austen had ‘stayed in her lane’; it was that she’d had the good sense to ask where it led. This is a splendid notion. It suggests that, for any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.”
(Side note, I love reading a bad review, especially when they are as incisive as Long Chu’s. What a gift to be shown how to course correct oneself at such a late stage in your career when everyone thinks you do no wrong. Thomas Mann would respond to criticism by saying “Thank you for returning me to myself.”)
History coats our life with meaning. Whatever we ignore or push out of the frame of our life and our work remains just offscreen, ready to imbue our books with unimagined significance or irrelevancy down the line. As artists, it’s our responsibility to understand this. The truth is that the self as a modern category didn’t exist before innumerable stories were told about it in art and literature. This is something trans writers in particular understand; our selves didn’t exist before we had stories of those potential selves. So why stop the evolution of the written self now?
Actual updates:
In addition to the upcoming seminar series, I’ve expanded upon my pedgagogy of the dysphoric, and it’s now on my website as a sort of teaching philosophy.
smoke and mold will be looking for readers soon—a good number of them. This isn’t posted anywhere yet, just a special heads up for avid readers of this newsletter. 2024 marks our 5th year of existence as a journal, and it’s an exciting time to be part of the team! Keep up with us on instagram or our website, where we’ll post the call soon.
I had fun reading my new story “Red Work” on a live stream recently. This was published in the most recent issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, a print only zine published by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. The recording is now up on my YouTube channel, where I hope to be doing more readings and making more videos soon.
If you live in the Portland area, I’m running a queer & trans quilting bee with some friends at Sincere Studio on October 29 as part of Portland Textile Month. Beginners welcome. If you don’t think quilting and writing are related, come fuck around and find out.
<3 Cal