The Case For Autofiction

Derek Neal Explores the Twisting, Shifting Heart of Reality Itself

Dear Republic,

As the old koan asks, ‘is a literary magazine really a literary magazine if it hasn’t had a feature on autofiction?’ The answer is: of course not. And we eagerly rectify this with an exchange (more a symposium than a debate) on the thorny nature of autofiction. Derek Neal goes first.

-ROL

THE CASE FOR AUTOFICTION

In 2000, James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” to classify recently published novels by Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and most infamously, Zadie Smith. Wood noted that hysterical realism had become the defining feature of “the big, ambitious novel” at the turn of the 21^st century, and that it was “now customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours and hours within a fictional world, without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful,” which Wood saw as a result of novelists eschewing “the representation of consciousness.” Instead, these novels focused on “information” and “connection,” mixing a dizzying number of characters, plots, and timelines, but forgetting that underneath it all, there needed to be a beating, human heart.

Ten years later, a new genre began to gain prominence: autofiction. Much has been written about this genre—including whether it even exists—and at this point, in 2025, one might expect the sort of piece that Wood wrote in 2000, a piece that defines autofiction in order to kill it and call for something new. The names most associated with autofiction—Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk—have moved on to other forms, and on Substack at least, there are many writers pushing for a return to literary realism, “maximalism,” and the social novel; in other words, novels like those Wood wrote about in 2000, rather than the “wan little husks” of autofiction. What gets lost in this debate, however, is what autofiction actually is, why it became popular, and crucially, what it shares with other forms of the novel.

In his description of hysterical realism, Wood continually insisted that what was lacking in these novels was “the human.” He noted that they were full of “inhuman stories” with characters that were “not really alive, not fully human,” but this fact was covered up by “an excess of storytelling.” In other words, there was plot but not character, because these novels had “an awkwardness about character and the representation of character.” With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that autofiction stepped into this void. If novelists were struggling to depict human characters, the most obvious solution would to be write about the person you knew best—yourself—and make this self into a character. This may be what Rachel Cusk meant when she said in a 2018 interview that she didn’t think “character exists anymore,” which she solved by writing about Faye, a fictional version of herself and the narrator of the Outline trilogy. Karl Ove Knausgaard, as well, solved this problem by writing about himself, using his real name. In an article for The Guardian prior to the publication of Book 6 of My Struggle, Knausgaard reflected on how the series resulted from his failure to write about his father’s death in a more traditional mode of fiction:

During the next five years I tried to tell the story attached to the house in Kristiansand, the story of my father’s decline and death. But it wouldn’t work. I had 800 pages of beginnings, none of which led me inside the inversion of light and dark in which I had existed during those days, none came anywhere near representing what I had experienced, neither on the personal level relating to my father, my grandmother, my brother and me, nor in what issued out of it in terms of how death affects the way a person looks on life and the world.

These attempts failed because, as Wood writes, they were “not really alive, not fully human.” Knausgaard even makes a bolder claim, suggesting that “this utmost authenticity, this proximity to the world, is partially sacrificed by the novel in favor of the form itself.” Instead, to get to the truth of his real life via the novel, Knausgaard says that he had to “write about my dad and me” rather than “the relationship between a father and a son.” Instead of writing “about a house where a man lived with his aged mother,” he had to write about “that particular house and the concrete reality that existed inside it.” Crucially, Knausgaard referred to My Struggle as a novel rather than autobiography or memoir, even though he was writing about real people and his real life. Cusk’s Outline trilogy were also presented as novels, despite featuring a protagonist that resembled her and depicting real events from her life. In the 2010s, Knausgaard, Cusk, and other writers of what came to be called autofiction (this term was usually applied by critics, not the authors themselves) all seemed to suggest that the traditional novel of a “fabricated character in a fabricated plot” (Knausgaard’s words) simply couldn’t speak to the reality of their lives, but by merging the novel with autobiography, they could say something true and reinvigorate the novel, writing something that would fulfill Wood’s implied criteria for a novel (“really affecting, sublime, or beautiful,” while also representing consciousness). Autofiction is a neat reversal of how Zadie Smith, quoted in Wood’s article, understood her own novelistic ambitions: Smith said she was interested in “ideas and themes that [she] can tie together” rather than “how somebody felt about something.” Smith wanted to go from the general to the specific, using ideas and themes to create individual characters and plots, whereas Knausgaard, in referencing his father, wanted to go from the specific to the general, using their personal relationship to say something true about fathers and sons. Both approaches can work (or fail), but it’s a question of “get[ting] the balance right,” as Smith noted.

At this point, certain readers will notice that I haven’t provided a precise definition of autofiction, besides indicating that it’s a merging of the novel with autobiography. This is intentional. Any definition that one provides will inevitably be revealed to be incomplete, either because there’s a novel not considered autofiction that does what autofiction is claimed to do, or because a novel that’s called autofiction doesn’t meet the required criteria. Some say autofiction must have a narrator that is the same as the author, including having the same name, but this already presents a problem in the case of Cusk. Some say autofiction must present itself, within the novel, as “the truth,” continually reminding the reader that these events “really happened,” but this isn’t true for Cusk, either. Some critics who view autofiction negatively claim that it is merely moment-to-moment narration of one’s existence, or an “itemization” of one’s experiences, but this is also inaccurate: Knausgaard’s project, which traces social and cultural changes in Norway from his childhood in the 70’s up to the present of the novel, is enough to refute this, just like the total length of the six books—3,600 pages—rejects Joyce Carol Oates’ characterization of autofiction as “wan little husks.”

This isn’t to suggest that autofiction doesn’t exist, but to suggest that we think about the category in a different way, asking why critics felt compelled to refer to so many novels in the 2010s as autofiction and looking at what features those novels shared. Rather than looking for the essence of autofiction or deciding which novels from the past might qualify as autofiction (Proust is often mentioned), we can look at Knausgaard, Cusk, and others, to see the similarities they share and the conditions that produced them. When we do this, we see that autofiction, at its most general, is a novel built from the autobiographical information of the author’s life. The novel is usually in first-person, featuring a protagonist that acts as a narrating consciousness, and the events of the novel are likely to have happened in real life. Even if they aren’t, they are likely to be presented as real within the novel.

Above all, an emphasis on “the real” and a concern with articulating this in language is a main concern of autofiction. Knausgaard does this by incorporating elements of metafiction into his novels, telling the reader that the book we’re reading is the book he’s writing, and all he's doing is writing down what happened to him as quickly as possible; Cusk investigates the classic distinction of seeming versus being, revealing so much of life to be a game that we participate in; and Bret Easton Ellis, to add another author to the mix, repeatedly tells the reader that “everything is real, this all really happened” in The Shards, his autofictional novel about one summer in the 1980s. While insisting on the real, these authors simultaneously undermine the real, allowing the events of their stories to contradict their subjective, first-person narration. This is a result of the form itself—when real experience is filtered through the novel, not only does this experience change, being shaped by written language, but the novel changes, too, moving beyond the bindings of a book and into what we call real life. The narrator becomes unreliable (a typical feature of autofiction), not to trick the reader or to reveal the narrator to be fundamentally misguided, but to collapse the distinction between reality and artifice, or the novel and real life, to show us that this dichotomy is a false one—our “real lives” are structured by fictions just as much as a novel; when we recognize this, the task for a novelist is to investigate the real as mercilessly as possible. If I must provide a definition of autofiction, this would be it. Autofiction, understood in this way, is the truest form of literature.

This emphasis on what we can really know to be true is present in all works of autofiction. For example, from the very first pages of Outline, Cusk destabilizes our notion of reality and fiction. Faye mentions a billionaire who might want to be a writer, and she wonders if he will “buy [his] way into it.” If he did so, would he be a “real” writer? Who’s to say? The possibility of being a billionaire used to be a fantasy, but we created a world where it’s possible. Next, Faye describes the pre-flight safety instructions on her plane to Athens, describing how the air hostess simulates movements with props while a recording plays, and the passengers listen dutifully, as in a church congregation. Everything is doubled or tripled, repeated to the point of meaninglessness. At the end of her description, Faye says, “Yet I wasn’t sure it was altogether true.” This line is ostensibly about the idea that passengers should strap on their own oxygen mask before helping others, but it could also refer to the entire paragraph, undercutting the charade of a safety routine that people listen to respectfully, even though in the event of a crash everyone will almost certainly die. Faye then begins talking to the passenger next to her, who “spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint.” It turns out that he’s Greek but attended English boarding school as a young child. Is he a “passionate Mediterranean” or a “refined Englishman?” Both, probably. And are these innate categories, or social constructions? Both, probably. The writers of autofiction investigate the place where language and culture push up against the real and make this their subject matter. Indeed, one way of understanding the Outline trilogy is as an accumulation of events and conversations that collapse the binary distinction between seeming and being in an attempt to get at something real.

This is why, in Kudos, Cusk refers to Brexit without ever using the word “Brexit.” In the novels Wood describes, which accumulate “information,” one can imagine a topic like Brexit being explained with statistics, data, research, and intersecting plots with various characters from Britain and continental Europe. But none of this would tell us, not really, why someone voted or not for Brexit—politics isn’t about informing people correctly, but about providing a sense of belonging and a vision that people can participate in. It’s irrational because it’s human. Cusk can’t use the word “Brexit” because this word carries connotations and preconceived narratives in the mind of the reader—it is a fiction that shields us from reality, whereas, to use Knausgaard’s famous construction, “the duty of literature is to fight fiction.” To say something meaningful about Brexit, Cusk has Faye fall into conversation with a fellow plane passenger who has been crisscrossing the globe for work but who has recently retired—he had a spreadsheet titled “Freedom,” and he finally made enough money to leave his job. Faye asks him if “his release from that prison had lived up to the title of his spreadsheet,” but he says that it hasn’t: “My family complain that now I’m at home all the time.” To understand Brexit, which Faye mentions obliquely in relation to this discussion, one has to think about what it means, on a human level, to leave or to remain. To invert Smith once again, one has to think about “how somebody felt about something” to then understand “ideas and themes.”

None of this is new, of course. The beginning of the novel, with Don Quixote, was about this very distinction between seeming and being, between what is real and artificial. Can Don Quixote become a knight, or is he simply Alonso Quijano, a Spanish nobleman? Or was his name really Quijada, or Quesada, or something else? Or is the idea of a stable identity throughout one’s life itself a fiction, a result of human technologies that allow for extensive recordkeeping and that make us, in some sense, legible to authority, while simultaneously allowing us to conceive of ourselves as distinct individuals, with all the wonderful and terrible possibilities that brings? The text itself emphasizes the question of authenticity on a formal level, too. Cervantes is the author, but he insists that he discovered the text in “the archives of La Mancha,” and that some of the text has been translated from Arabic. This is not simply a parlor trick, but a device used to remind us that we’re reading a text while also insisting that the text is real. Hamlet does the same thing, putting a play within a play, and it does this so that Hamlet can discover the truth of whether his uncle killed his father, while also reminding the audience that they, too, are watching a play, but that truth is to be found there—not literal truth, but something else, something deeper, more like existential truth. If the techniques of autofiction are not new, then, but go all the way back to the beginning of the novel (and further), why did the 2010s see such interest in this form?

In a 2019 essay for The Point titled “Real Characters,” Toril Moi identified Knausgaard, Cusk, and others as writing “existential novels.” She notes that these novels are about “what it is like to be alive here and now, what it is like to exist in a specific historical and social moment.” The emphasis on “what it is like to be alive here and now” is a response, according to Moi, to “a deep disgust with the fakeness of so much of our culture.” This echoes something Knausgaard has said about his need to write My Struggle, that he was “tired of fiction,” by which he didn’t necessarily mean novels but things like newspaper articles and social media “takes.” Writing about this in the Los Angeles Review of Books, William Pierce noted that the distinction for Knausgaard was “not whether something happened, but how the account [was] packaged or structured […]. He was bucking not against the novel as such, but against a certain kind of story-formation.” Moi and Pierce, then, help us understand the boom in autofiction in the 2010’s—this “reality hunger” is not a new concern, but one that takes on increased importance in a world that seems to come to us in pre-mediated and pre-packaged forms, and one in which the notion of a “self” is further refracted through social media and the internet. If we live in a “post truth” world, the solution is not to insist on simplistic notions of facts or truth, but to deeply consider how facts and truth are created. Taking this idea seriously, memoir and autobiography become impossible as genres, and the only way to write authentically about oneself is through autofiction. As Moi writes, “the subject may well be a construction, but there is still something it is like to be me, or you.”

While everyone agrees Knausgaard and Cusk were creating autofiction, one well-known author in particular exists in an indeterminate space: Elena Ferrante. This is partly because “Elena Ferrante” is a pseudonym and her real identity is unknown, yet her Neapolitan Novels, a four-volume series recounting the life of a character named “Elena” who grows up in Naples and becomes a writer, closely tracks Ferrante’s (invented) biography, making the novels seem autobiographical. Knausgaard, Cusk, and Ferrante all write in the first person about writers who closely resemble themselves, but to consider Ferrante autofiction, we would have to locate an emphasis on the real that also questions the neat distinction between reality and artifice. We find just this in the prologue to My Brilliant Friend.

Elena, in the present of the novel, receives a call from Rino, the son of her childhood friend, Lila. Rino tells Elena that Lila has disappeared and wonders if Elena knows where she is. He speaks in “an awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian,” which is a duality that will recur throughout the books—the dialect of Elena’s childhood in Naples, which is seen as pure, authentic, and emotional, contrasted with the Italian of Elena’s adulthood, which is formal, learned, and above all, literary. Rino then begins to cry, which Elena describes as “sobs that began fake and became real.” We can’t help but be reminded of Cusk here, and her emphasis on seeming and being. Elena learns from Rino that Lila has not only disappeared, but also removed every piece of evidence testifying to her ever having existed: “She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.” In other words, she does not want to be represented in any way. Elena responds by representing her and “began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.” Here we learn that the Neapolitan Novels, tracing the story of Elena and Lila’s friendship, are being written by Elena as we read them. Through Elena’s narration, Ferrante surfaces the construction of the novel, just like Knausgaard, and she does so fully aware of the dangers of novelizing life, of the fact that, as Knausgaard said, “this utmost authenticity, this proximity to the world, is partially sacrificed by the novel in favor of the form itself.” This is why Lila does not want to be represented, and when Elena does represent her in another book about their life called A Friendship, a sort of mise en abyme of My Brilliant Friend, Lila is imagined as being angry because Elena had “deliberately exaggerated,” “accentuated the trauma,” and “intensif[ied] the emotional effects” of her story. While Elena attempted to focus on the real and pare her language down to the essential (she says the story is “linear” and “told concisely”), she also gave in to the demands of the novel. This is inevitable, however. In Knausgaard’s own estimation, My Struggle fails because, even though he tried to write as honestly as possible, he still “made [his] father into something like a character in a novel.”

We can see that Knausgaard, Cusk, and Ferrante are similar stylistically, but what of Ferrante’s identity? How can we say that the Elena of My Brilliant Friend is “Elena Ferrante” when “Elena Ferrante” doesn’t exist? I’d like to suggest that Ferrante, in writing something that seems like a “fake autobiography,” is simply creating a larger autofiction. If the self, meaning the single, defined self is “mostly a work of fiction,” as Justin Smith-Ruiu recently wrote in his own article on autofiction, then there is no reason why a writer shouldn’t create “two author characters, one inside the text and one outside.” (Katherine Hill makes this point in her article on Ferrante and autofiction.) Autofiction, taken to its logical conclusion, isn’t simply a merging of the novel with autobiography on the page, but outside it as well; it’s an appreciation that as humans—as linguistic, meaning-making beings—we can only understand ourselves through narrative and language; we are already fictional beings.

So what of autofiction in 2025? Knausgaard, Cusk, and Ferrante, in their recent work, seem to be writing more traditional fiction. Is autofiction over? The 2010s version might be—Knausgaard himself said that, eventually, his style in My Struggle would “come to feel as conventional as what it refused to imitate.” Teju Cole, whose 2011 novel Open City is often classed as autofiction, published the novel Tremor two years ago. This novel follows a Cole-like protagonist (the narrator, Tunde, is a Nigerian-American professor at Harvard, like Cole), but midway through the novel, Tunde is left behind and the novel jumps from the point of view of one character to another in a series of short vignettes. These are not major characters, but ones we visit for a page or two. Catherine Lacey’s new work, The Möbius Book, is half memoir and half fiction, and either half can be read first; Jon Repetti called it the “primal scene of contemporary autofiction.” These books are not the autofiction of Knausgaard or Cusk, not quite, but they have the same goal—the desire to articulate the real—which is the very stuff of literature, and they bear the influence of the past decade’s emphasis on autofiction. For writers who want to say something about “what it is like to be alive here and now,” the truth of autofiction cannot be ignored.

Derek Neal is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario.