A good and measured piece (no doubt the Substack Boyz response will be too /s) but I find myself shocked you gave Wood's piece so much weight; it's hard to tell if you AGREE per se with him, but his essay was what actually made me give up on him. He can, like the execrable Harold Bloom, be a close reader of some value. But his anachronistic and reactionary aesthetic values, like Bloom's, always left him trying to defend a fortress that had already been abandoned. His piece wasn't as stupid and useless as BR Myers in the Atlantic, but was still rooted in the same "I am not finding books like I want them to be so the books must be wrong" nostalgia.
I realize one must choose, but also somewhat surprising to find that the main considered mode here was Knausgaard (who, it must be said, and never is, was the sales impetus behind the publishing of more autofiction, him and Ferrante), who patently shapes his books into thrillers that narrate mundanity, and Cusk, who you amply demonstrate shapes her narratives into highly effective symbol delivery systems that are not "real" but real, but not the just as cerebral and inward-facing Annie Ernaux, who, you know, won a Nobel for autofiction. Not to speak of Anne Berest's The Postcard, even Modiano arguably edges up to and around the label. My point being, I guess, that autofiction carries the "taint" or the whiff of Europeanness and snobbery and elite things that often drives the very dumb complaints against it here. Even though Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Philip Roth were all well-known practitioners in the US. And of course Ben Lerner. I think the unspoken snobbery of anti-snobbery is an important part of the tedious and circular discourse about this topic on this forum. Not this piece, which, as I say, is measured and really good.
Thanks, Greg. I focused on Knausgaard and Cusk as they are the two authors I'm most familiar with when it comes to autofiction, and they're the two most people think of as well. But you're right that there are others, and it's somewhat arbitrary who gets stuck with the label and who doesn't. Coetzee is another we could mention. In the future I might write something about European autofiction versus American autofiction, but I need to read more American autofiction to do that and to see what the differences are (if there are differences). I have a few hunches, mainly that European autofiction might be more entangled with history and place, whereas American autofiction might be more tightly focused on the individual without a consideration of culture, society, etc. But that's really just an idea, and I'm not sure if the evidence would support it. Then there's also Canadian autofiction, mainly Sheila Heti, but a reader also recommended Alice Munro's "The View from Castle Rock" based on this essay, so I'll be reading that as well.
Dasa Drndic, too, I think, although she was more in the tradition of "nonfiction novels" like Javier Cercas. Sebald, of course, and Maria Stepanova.
Someone argued that European literary culture doesn't really talk about "autofiction" as such, just thinking of the genre as "memoir" but I am not sure if a) that is true across Europe b) that is true in any language/literature per se. Stefan Hertmans is another author, who definitely fits your distinction above. See The Ascent.
Thanks for the recs. I'm not sure about current European literary culture and how it refers to autofiction, but I do know the term itself first gained currency in France in the 70s. A lot of articles will mention that French author Serge Doubrovsky invented the term referring to his novel "Fils" in 1977, although I've read that it was mentioned before that in a book review in The New York Times by Paul West. French critic Gérard Genette also talked about autofiction. So my understanding is that we caught on a bit later in the anglo world, but perhaps now we talk about it whereas other cultures don't as much. There's a good overview to the history of autofiction in the introduction to a book called "Knausgaard and the Autofictional Novel" by Claus Elholm Andersen if you're interested.
Great reply. The Wood quote almost made me give up on the article, but I'm glad I read it through to the end. Wood obviously hasn't read or understood DFW, since Infinite Jest begins with a mute consciousness trapped within a body, seeing but not being seen, describing the events and people around him in great detail but unable to connect them or himself to the world. How is that not a representation of consciousness?
'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.”'
What complete bollocks this Wood person writes. So great literature has only existed since Joyce? Would he include Henry James in his narrow definition? These spurious genre distinctions are Manichean dead ends- there is only good writing, autofiction or otherwise. Everything else is marketing.
Wood is basically right, and David Foster Wallace is just not a good writer.
Say what you will about autofiction, it's a better approach than the kind of post-post-modern, Infinite Jest garbage that only appeals to people who think reading is all about endurance.
I loved this, "people who think reading is all about endurance." Makes me laugh. I did buy Infinite Jest out of a sense of wanting to 'catch up' on the turn of the century novel. It still sits on my book shelf but I am less and less inclined to read it now that I've been hearing about it more. Also, this idea of 'endurance' figured into my reluctance to read War and Peace, which I thankfully overcame, because if was absolutely wonderful and not difficult at all.
So, you haven't read it then. Claiming that certain writers are good and that others are not because they don't write the kind of books that you like is like claiming that pop music is better than death metal. Horses for courses. I happen to like autofiction and the kind of books that Wood hates. He's not wrong to dislike those books, just wrong to claim that they're not as good as autofiction. Genuine question- how could you excise an author’s life experience so completely that their writing ceases to contain any traces of themselves?
It's not a readable book, it's just vomit. If I want "a mute consciousness trapped within a body" I'll read Beckett, and people who imitate Beckett successfully. People read Infinite Jest for one reason: to prove how smart they are. I read for entertainment & pleasure.
> Claiming that certain writers are good and that others are not because they don't write the kind of books that you like is like claiming that pop music is better than death metal.
You are falling for this stupid "let people enjoy things" bullshit. We all have our tastes and opinions. I think it's better when people are confident in their taste and opinions, and they discuss them openly and try to influence each other. Yes it results in conflict, but it's fun. Suppressing conflict by saying "let people enjoy things" is leading to a sterile artistic culture.
> He's not wrong to dislike those books, just wrong to claim that they're not as good as autofiction
As far as I know, James Wood did not claim that autofiction is better than hysterical realism. That's my opinion.
> Genuine question- how could you excise an author’s life experience so completely that their writing ceases to contain any traces of themselves?
You can't do it completely. What you can do is use metaphor. The writer has had a certain emotional experience, and they think of a different person who had a different experience that produced the same emotion, and write about that. If you get good enough at analogizing your experiences, you can convincingly turn them into all kinds of things.
You can't escape subjectivity completely, but you can do interesting things with it. The reason autofiction is not going to be a durable movement is that it literalizes the writer's subjectivity by producing autobiography. It doesn't use metaphor as I described above. It's therefore far less flexible and more constricting, and writers will reject it for something more freeing.
So, subjectivity is still king then, as in, you can't objectively compare books from one genre to another as being good or bad. You know that you can read other authors as well as Beckett, or that other people's literary tastes are as valid as yours, only different? Literary taste is like food taste- imagine telling someone that the food that they like isn't as good as the food that you like, and you get some idea of how hopeless it is. It's not sterile, it's futile.
Regarding the use of metaphor, I'm reminded of Plato's explanation of why writers shouldn't use them at all by him using the metaphor of prisoners in a cave...
Subjectivity and objectivity are both necessary, you can't get rid of either one. If you get rid of subjectivity you're left with unconsciousness if you get rid of objectivity you're left with solipsism.
There are a lot of people like you these days who do this "it's all a matter of taste" thing. It's quite sad because it shows how little regard you have for your own taste, and how unable you are to defend your viewpoint. I insult Infinite Jest, and you respond, not by defending Infinite Jest, but by saying "taste is completely subjective." That's pretty weak, man.
I have to say, I don't envy you. Infinite Jest, Tolstoy, hardcore anal porn, it's all the same to you. A world without distinctions isn't livable.
20th century literature was marked by modernism, a shift from (19th century) objectivity to subjectivity. Autofiction represents the exhaustion of that tradition, even more so than postmodernism. It's not that autofiction is bad, some is good, it's just that you can go no more subjective than autobiography.
Writers who want to innovate going forward will find ways to incorporate objectivity.
This is a point that Knausgaard talks about often referencing Peter Handke's "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams." Handke's books is about his mother's suicide, but according to Knausgaard, he refuses to "represent" his mother and tries to describe the events of her life as dispassionately as possible. Knausgaard tries to talk about the book in a way that doesn't fall into the objectivity/subjectivity binary. I think in some ways Handke's book is key in tracing the development of the autofiction I'm talking about in my essay, as it takes very personal material but tries to relate it as truthfully as possible.
This is what Knausgaard said about being objective:
"I think “objective” maybe is the wrong word—and objectivity is impossible, anyway. What I admire in “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams” is that it’s uncorrupt. We have expectations about how a good novel should look, how a good sentence should look, what quality is, what a story is, what a life looks like. That’s why not fulfilling expectations is so important in literature and art. It makes it possible for us to see ourselves, because we’re no longer inside the expected but somewhere else—and from there we can see the world as we think it is."
This is gonna get kinda metaphysical (pretentious), but: if you are saying true objectivity in literature is impossible and you are really honest, you must admit that true subjectivity in literature is also impossible. Literature is a form of communication from writer to reader, and to work the reader & writer must have certain information in common: the language. The shared information of any system of communication constitutes its objectivity. The more shared information, the more objective the system is. Contrariwise, private information constitutes the system's subjectivity.
I think both objectivity & subjectivity are possible & necessary for communication, it's just that subjectivity is in fashion and has been for a long time. So when Knausgaard refuses to say the word "objectivity," he's being defensive. He means objectivity.
What is impossible is complete objectivity and complete subjectivity. Complete subjectivity precludes any shared information (like language) which makes communication impossible, and complete objectivity precludes any private information, so everyone already knows everything: there is nothing to say.
What I'm saying used to be kind of commonplace in literary circles, people would say you have to "find the universal (objective) in the particular (subjective)." But we've gone off on kind of a solipsistic tangent.
I think the point of contention here is the definition of objectivity. When Knausgaard uses it, I take him to mean that because our understanding of the world is mediated through language, for example, we can’t really get all the way to the objective truth. He often talks about “two worlds,” meaning the world as it is, and then how we order and structure that world in various ways, and then he says he explores that gap and tries to get as close to the real world as possible. I can see why this wouldn’t be an acceptable definition in philosophy, but Knausgaard is mainly interested in literary truth and how he can achieve that in the novel. Your definition of objectivity includes language, and if I understand correctly, if two people agree on something, that’s objective (sorry if I’m putting this crudely). So it seems two different understandings of objectivity are being talked about here.
I would also say that Knausgaard does think we can get to the universal from the particular, and that’s why he’s focused so much on the particular, as it’s a pathway towards something universal, even if he never quite gets there.
I don't really disagree with what he's saying. He assumes subjectivity as the default and tries to achieve the impossible objectivity. What I'm challenging is the directionality: I think in a different culture, say a very collectivist one, a writer might start from a place of objectivity (shared truth), and try to find some kind of private truth, something only they know. And that would be equally unattainable.
Oh, I follow that better. What you’re describing sounds a lot like epic poetry, where the poet would work within a shared tradition and a known story, but perform it orally in their own way.
You are perhaps unfamiliar with Laurent Binet, Benjamin Labbatut, Andre Breton (see my piece on Nadja here at RoL), James Agee, Javier Cercas, and Mailer's Armies of the Night or Rodolfo Walsh's Operation Massacre, all workers and works of the "non-fiction novel tradition" that in the US is traceable from Hiroshima and In Cold Blood. it really isn't an either/or thing and this reduction of all of modernism to a focus on subjectivity only is really a badly thought out take that should die in a fire even if of course it is not "wrong" that the plumbing of the subjective was an important element of the shift.
I agree it isn't an either/or thing. I never said subjectivity was bad, I said writers should think about how to incorporate more objectivity going forward. I never said they should abandon subjectivity and replace in with objectivity. Just mix it up a bit.
The modernist writers grew up reading 19th century literature, and they learned a lot from it, but they moved away from it by incorporating subjectivity.
100 years later, the writers of today have grown up in a tradition of increasingly radical subjectivity. They should learn the lessons of that tradition, but move away from it by incorporating some objectivity.
> this reduction of all of modernism to a focus on subjectivity only is really a badly thought out take that should die in a fire even if of course it is not "wrong"
Neither are you right though. The Objectivists would quibble with your description of their project since they were modernists but also not concerned with subjectivity. For that matter, Dos Passos was pretty disinterested in it.
As a Social Novel Enjoyer being obliquely responded to here, I'll weigh in and say a lot of what I don't like about the autofiction era just comes down to whether it excites me and gets me high on life and art or whether it leaves me vaguely depressed. While I'm not unsympathetic to the goals of the project as a whole that you describe here, what I fail to see is why it necessarily has to manifest itself in very flat, terse prose, in aphoristic little paragraphs, in banal descriptions meant to defamiliarize. Therein lies the difference, I think, between the crew you describe and autobiographical or semi-autobiographical work like On the Road, Herzog, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, my beloved New Journalism etc. All of those I feel deeply believe in literature as a form and when I think of them I can remember how electric and alive they felt in my hands and how they made me look around and see every leaf on every tree anew.
Whereas around when I was just becoming aware of modern fiction, the fiction itself was giving me the impression that it was a spent force, that it was confused about the role of literature itself, that it was floundering around with a lack of purpose. And that didn't make me want to write and didn't make me want to read. Ultimately I feel like it's useful to do some questioning of the distinction between reality and artifice and the limits of the form, and to point out that a painting of a horse is not a horse at all but an arrangement of colors and shapes, but if that takes over as an aesthetic impulse it's like, well, why should anyone do anything at all. I remember reading Olivia Laing's Crudo, I had really loved her first (straight memoir) book, and deeply deeply hating it and just being like if this is what modern literature is-- little paragraphs about how it feels to read tweets about Trump and Brexit-- we're completely fucked. Ultimately you have to have confidence in what you're doing. I don't feel this way about Knausgaard or Ferrante, who will outlast their times-- they clearly have It, whatever It is-- but I do feel it about the second rank and below.
I don’t doubt that there’s bad autofiction but a lot of the criticisms leveled at it never made sense to me because they don’t ring true for people like Knausgaard (as you point out). I’ve never read Crudo so maybe I’ve just avoided the bad stuff, although from your description it sounds more like what I’d call an “internet novel,” which I also dislike and wrote a piece on (mainly mentioning Oyler’s Fake Accounts). Books about being on the internet are usually pretty bad imo, and maybe there’s some autofiction that falls into this category, but not the authors I mention here. In any case I’ve appreciated the back and forth and it’s been very thought provoking for me.
The lines between autobiography and novel have been blurred since the beginning of the novel—books like Robinson Crusoe were originally taken by readers to be real-life accounts instead of fictional stories, so it's interesting to see so much discussion about autofiction when I don't know if it's such a leap after all.
“So what of autofiction in 2025? Knausgaard, Cusk, and Ferrante, in their recent work, seem to be writing more traditional fiction. Is autofiction over?”
I think it’s clear now that autofiction has been around forever, but as the essay points out it’s focused “resurgence” brought it to the forefront to create all the discourse you’re addressing. My hope is that “autofiction” by any stretch of a definition becomes so normalized in a way, or readers desensitized to it, that anyone that’s interested in writing auto or meta fiction will be able to experiment and try and push the form further (not sure what that looks like) instead of being written off. For whatever reason, the autobiographical mode is received well by the public and is par for the course in other media (sitcom/comedy, rap, podcasts, etc.,).
It sounds like autofiction is mainly being criticized for timidity and lack of imagination - charges which can be levelled against literature of any genre. But as many have pointed out, it's questionable if autofiction even makes sense as a distinct genre, because elements of it have existed in fiction for centuries.
More recently: was Saul Bellow doing autofiction when he wrote "Ravelstein," which is officially a novel ("this is a work of fiction" says the usual don't-sue-me disclaimer at the front) but is really lightly fictionalized autobiography? How about WG Sebald? I've never seen him accused of being an autofictionist, but he certainly fits the criteria. Houllebecq didn't just put himself into "The Map and the Territory" as a character, he made himself the victim of a gruesome murder. This is autofiction of an imaginative and risk-taking character.
So I think criticism of autofiction mainly falls within the basic parameters of Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap," including, by implication, autofiction).
Great work as always. (I'm dropped in here from May, 2026 link. I missed this article somehow.)
I'm a fan of the "hysterical realism" authors, read all their books. The idea that they lack a human heart is preposterous.
The heart and the mind are hopelessly intertwined.
Decades ago I got an English degree, and it put me off reading novels for years afterward. My brain was rotted from years of reading peole talking "about" fiction when the only answer to a novel is another novel. Otherwise it's like "dancing about architecture". 😉
Thanks, flipshod, appreciate the comment. On "hysterical realism" authors, I've been meaning to finally read Infinite Jest, almost bought it the other day as all the stores have the new 30th anniversary edition.
And I'm waiting for your first post of 2026...(enjoyed the couple articles you posted last year).
Only a little less than halfway through. Good stuff. But my question has been and remains: how is this different from memoir? No one I have read who is writing about auto fiction seems to really want to or be able to differentiate the two forms. I may be wrong about this, but I am beginning to wonder if memoir is being (willfully or otherwise) misunderstood or underestimated. Thoughts?
I must come back to this to read more closely, but at a glance there seems a large piece of the puzzle missing: the French. Well before the recent vogue for "autofiction" in the Anglo world, including in the translations mentioned (Knausy and Ferrante), it was already an ubiquitous and tired mode in France, pioneered by such luminaries as Annie Ernaux (Nobel laureate no less!) and carried on to tedious extremes by many many others. I'm pretty sure "autofiction" is itself a French coinage. Seems weird to discuss the genre without reference to French literature.. Except that no-one gives a shit about French literature anywhere but France anymore. Even I don't, and I live there and studied French lit for my PhD...
Ya, you’re right. My intention wasn’t to give a history of autofiction but to really focus on what became a phenomenon in the Anglo lit scene for a certain period. There are a lot of pieces that do go into the history, usually citing the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 with coining the term. But I’ve also found a source that says it appears a few years earlier in English in a NYT review. I also studied French and lived in France for a bit, have written about contemporary authors like Houellebecq and Modiano, but, well, you can’t include everything. I take your point though.
Thanks for a very good introduction to autofiction, a topic I haven't studied, but which always hovers in the back of your head, whether you read Cervantes, Dickens, di Lampedusa, Maugham, Stendhal, Strindberg, Tolstoy, and Verghese. Personally, I prefer stories that feel real, but reality can be awfully boring why writers use literary license. Authors are not reporters or court stenographers. They work with what they have experienced, learned, and stuff they invent. If it's well done, it captures the reader's interest, and sometimes provides deep insights into life and society that besides entertainment can have an impact on the reader's life. That's my two cents....
I've no problem with a reader doing a dnf if they find the book unbearable. I have a big problem with people criticising a book that they haven't read. Although I suspect that Dan Brown's output might be terrible, I can't confirm that until I've actually read it (which will hopefully be never). So I withhold my judgement until I'm trapped in a lift with it or held in a hostage situation with the armed author.
Did you know that for forty years, there were gold, silver and bronze medals for poetry? Also painting, sculpture, architecture and music. All of the gold medalists submitted objectively better work than their other competitors because they have a gold medal to prove it. This is the objectivity argument in a nutshell, and probably one of the reasons that they dropped poetry and the arts from the Olympic games. Interestingly, they were dropped by one Avery Brundage, who had submitted his poetry in two previous Olympics but failed to win a medal. Clearly a case of 'if you can't win 'em, beat 'em'.
I love Beckett's work, for very different reasons that I love DFWs work, and the same is true of Borges, Calvino, Pessoa etc. I can see why people hate DFW (I'll never read the first half of The Pale King again), but the people who think they know what his work is without actually trying to read it are just inverted versions of the same posers who pretend to read his stuff because the books weigh a lot. They should provide alternate covers for his books with hard core porn titles, just so readers like me can avoid either type of poser. I missed out on the 90s hype around his work because I was bringing up kids and had no time to read anything, so I can to IJ with no idea what it was. I suspect that the hate heaped upon him is a reaction to that. DFWs essays on the State Fair and cruise liners are amazing, very different to his fiction.
I agree that art is better than porn, but if people are looking for porn and they find Kafka they're going to be disappointed. Although I'm not kink-shaming Kafka-porn enthusiasts, if they exist. They should maybe seek help though.
This seems like some bogus label some editor or someone has decided to place on fiction. It seems to me that fiction itself is all autofiction. Everyone is writing auto fiction in my opinion because they have to imagine their characters in mundane and extreme situations alike, to see how that character would react. How are they going to know what emotion to feel – from their own lives, of course, or gleaned from someone very close to them (close enough that the author can get some insight into their psyche). If you don't want to be labeled this unnecessary label of an auto-fiction-er, don't write in first-person. That'll likely help with some of the mis-labeling.
Read the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sprawling autobiography. Didn’t seem too different from Ham on Rye or Death on the Installment Plan. I didn’t think he’d done anything new. I did feel like he pulled me into his experience sufficiently enough. But damn, to ride that gravy train into six volumes? That’s what happens when you marry your editor.
A good and measured piece (no doubt the Substack Boyz response will be too /s) but I find myself shocked you gave Wood's piece so much weight; it's hard to tell if you AGREE per se with him, but his essay was what actually made me give up on him. He can, like the execrable Harold Bloom, be a close reader of some value. But his anachronistic and reactionary aesthetic values, like Bloom's, always left him trying to defend a fortress that had already been abandoned. His piece wasn't as stupid and useless as BR Myers in the Atlantic, but was still rooted in the same "I am not finding books like I want them to be so the books must be wrong" nostalgia.
I realize one must choose, but also somewhat surprising to find that the main considered mode here was Knausgaard (who, it must be said, and never is, was the sales impetus behind the publishing of more autofiction, him and Ferrante), who patently shapes his books into thrillers that narrate mundanity, and Cusk, who you amply demonstrate shapes her narratives into highly effective symbol delivery systems that are not "real" but real, but not the just as cerebral and inward-facing Annie Ernaux, who, you know, won a Nobel for autofiction. Not to speak of Anne Berest's The Postcard, even Modiano arguably edges up to and around the label. My point being, I guess, that autofiction carries the "taint" or the whiff of Europeanness and snobbery and elite things that often drives the very dumb complaints against it here. Even though Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Philip Roth were all well-known practitioners in the US. And of course Ben Lerner. I think the unspoken snobbery of anti-snobbery is an important part of the tedious and circular discourse about this topic on this forum. Not this piece, which, as I say, is measured and really good.
Thanks, Greg. I focused on Knausgaard and Cusk as they are the two authors I'm most familiar with when it comes to autofiction, and they're the two most people think of as well. But you're right that there are others, and it's somewhat arbitrary who gets stuck with the label and who doesn't. Coetzee is another we could mention. In the future I might write something about European autofiction versus American autofiction, but I need to read more American autofiction to do that and to see what the differences are (if there are differences). I have a few hunches, mainly that European autofiction might be more entangled with history and place, whereas American autofiction might be more tightly focused on the individual without a consideration of culture, society, etc. But that's really just an idea, and I'm not sure if the evidence would support it. Then there's also Canadian autofiction, mainly Sheila Heti, but a reader also recommended Alice Munro's "The View from Castle Rock" based on this essay, so I'll be reading that as well.
Dasa Drndic, too, I think, although she was more in the tradition of "nonfiction novels" like Javier Cercas. Sebald, of course, and Maria Stepanova.
Someone argued that European literary culture doesn't really talk about "autofiction" as such, just thinking of the genre as "memoir" but I am not sure if a) that is true across Europe b) that is true in any language/literature per se. Stefan Hertmans is another author, who definitely fits your distinction above. See The Ascent.
Thanks for the recs. I'm not sure about current European literary culture and how it refers to autofiction, but I do know the term itself first gained currency in France in the 70s. A lot of articles will mention that French author Serge Doubrovsky invented the term referring to his novel "Fils" in 1977, although I've read that it was mentioned before that in a book review in The New York Times by Paul West. French critic Gérard Genette also talked about autofiction. So my understanding is that we caught on a bit later in the anglo world, but perhaps now we talk about it whereas other cultures don't as much. There's a good overview to the history of autofiction in the introduction to a book called "Knausgaard and the Autofictional Novel" by Claus Elholm Andersen if you're interested.
Great reply. The Wood quote almost made me give up on the article, but I'm glad I read it through to the end. Wood obviously hasn't read or understood DFW, since Infinite Jest begins with a mute consciousness trapped within a body, seeing but not being seen, describing the events and people around him in great detail but unable to connect them or himself to the world. How is that not a representation of consciousness?
'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.”'
What complete bollocks this Wood person writes. So great literature has only existed since Joyce? Would he include Henry James in his narrow definition? These spurious genre distinctions are Manichean dead ends- there is only good writing, autofiction or otherwise. Everything else is marketing.
Wood is basically right, and David Foster Wallace is just not a good writer.
Say what you will about autofiction, it's a better approach than the kind of post-post-modern, Infinite Jest garbage that only appeals to people who think reading is all about endurance.
I loved this, "people who think reading is all about endurance." Makes me laugh. I did buy Infinite Jest out of a sense of wanting to 'catch up' on the turn of the century novel. It still sits on my book shelf but I am less and less inclined to read it now that I've been hearing about it more. Also, this idea of 'endurance' figured into my reluctance to read War and Peace, which I thankfully overcame, because if was absolutely wonderful and not difficult at all.
So, you haven't read it then. Claiming that certain writers are good and that others are not because they don't write the kind of books that you like is like claiming that pop music is better than death metal. Horses for courses. I happen to like autofiction and the kind of books that Wood hates. He's not wrong to dislike those books, just wrong to claim that they're not as good as autofiction. Genuine question- how could you excise an author’s life experience so completely that their writing ceases to contain any traces of themselves?
It's not a readable book, it's just vomit. If I want "a mute consciousness trapped within a body" I'll read Beckett, and people who imitate Beckett successfully. People read Infinite Jest for one reason: to prove how smart they are. I read for entertainment & pleasure.
> Claiming that certain writers are good and that others are not because they don't write the kind of books that you like is like claiming that pop music is better than death metal.
You are falling for this stupid "let people enjoy things" bullshit. We all have our tastes and opinions. I think it's better when people are confident in their taste and opinions, and they discuss them openly and try to influence each other. Yes it results in conflict, but it's fun. Suppressing conflict by saying "let people enjoy things" is leading to a sterile artistic culture.
> He's not wrong to dislike those books, just wrong to claim that they're not as good as autofiction
As far as I know, James Wood did not claim that autofiction is better than hysterical realism. That's my opinion.
> Genuine question- how could you excise an author’s life experience so completely that their writing ceases to contain any traces of themselves?
You can't do it completely. What you can do is use metaphor. The writer has had a certain emotional experience, and they think of a different person who had a different experience that produced the same emotion, and write about that. If you get good enough at analogizing your experiences, you can convincingly turn them into all kinds of things.
You can't escape subjectivity completely, but you can do interesting things with it. The reason autofiction is not going to be a durable movement is that it literalizes the writer's subjectivity by producing autobiography. It doesn't use metaphor as I described above. It's therefore far less flexible and more constricting, and writers will reject it for something more freeing.
So, subjectivity is still king then, as in, you can't objectively compare books from one genre to another as being good or bad. You know that you can read other authors as well as Beckett, or that other people's literary tastes are as valid as yours, only different? Literary taste is like food taste- imagine telling someone that the food that they like isn't as good as the food that you like, and you get some idea of how hopeless it is. It's not sterile, it's futile.
Regarding the use of metaphor, I'm reminded of Plato's explanation of why writers shouldn't use them at all by him using the metaphor of prisoners in a cave...
Subjectivity and objectivity are both necessary, you can't get rid of either one. If you get rid of subjectivity you're left with unconsciousness if you get rid of objectivity you're left with solipsism.
There are a lot of people like you these days who do this "it's all a matter of taste" thing. It's quite sad because it shows how little regard you have for your own taste, and how unable you are to defend your viewpoint. I insult Infinite Jest, and you respond, not by defending Infinite Jest, but by saying "taste is completely subjective." That's pretty weak, man.
I have to say, I don't envy you. Infinite Jest, Tolstoy, hardcore anal porn, it's all the same to you. A world without distinctions isn't livable.
20th century literature was marked by modernism, a shift from (19th century) objectivity to subjectivity. Autofiction represents the exhaustion of that tradition, even more so than postmodernism. It's not that autofiction is bad, some is good, it's just that you can go no more subjective than autobiography.
Writers who want to innovate going forward will find ways to incorporate objectivity.
This is a point that Knausgaard talks about often referencing Peter Handke's "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams." Handke's books is about his mother's suicide, but according to Knausgaard, he refuses to "represent" his mother and tries to describe the events of her life as dispassionately as possible. Knausgaard tries to talk about the book in a way that doesn't fall into the objectivity/subjectivity binary. I think in some ways Handke's book is key in tracing the development of the autofiction I'm talking about in my essay, as it takes very personal material but tries to relate it as truthfully as possible.
This is what Knausgaard said about being objective:
"I think “objective” maybe is the wrong word—and objectivity is impossible, anyway. What I admire in “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams” is that it’s uncorrupt. We have expectations about how a good novel should look, how a good sentence should look, what quality is, what a story is, what a life looks like. That’s why not fulfilling expectations is so important in literature and art. It makes it possible for us to see ourselves, because we’re no longer inside the expected but somewhere else—and from there we can see the world as we think it is."
This is gonna get kinda metaphysical (pretentious), but: if you are saying true objectivity in literature is impossible and you are really honest, you must admit that true subjectivity in literature is also impossible. Literature is a form of communication from writer to reader, and to work the reader & writer must have certain information in common: the language. The shared information of any system of communication constitutes its objectivity. The more shared information, the more objective the system is. Contrariwise, private information constitutes the system's subjectivity.
I think both objectivity & subjectivity are possible & necessary for communication, it's just that subjectivity is in fashion and has been for a long time. So when Knausgaard refuses to say the word "objectivity," he's being defensive. He means objectivity.
What is impossible is complete objectivity and complete subjectivity. Complete subjectivity precludes any shared information (like language) which makes communication impossible, and complete objectivity precludes any private information, so everyone already knows everything: there is nothing to say.
What I'm saying used to be kind of commonplace in literary circles, people would say you have to "find the universal (objective) in the particular (subjective)." But we've gone off on kind of a solipsistic tangent.
I think the point of contention here is the definition of objectivity. When Knausgaard uses it, I take him to mean that because our understanding of the world is mediated through language, for example, we can’t really get all the way to the objective truth. He often talks about “two worlds,” meaning the world as it is, and then how we order and structure that world in various ways, and then he says he explores that gap and tries to get as close to the real world as possible. I can see why this wouldn’t be an acceptable definition in philosophy, but Knausgaard is mainly interested in literary truth and how he can achieve that in the novel. Your definition of objectivity includes language, and if I understand correctly, if two people agree on something, that’s objective (sorry if I’m putting this crudely). So it seems two different understandings of objectivity are being talked about here.
I would also say that Knausgaard does think we can get to the universal from the particular, and that’s why he’s focused so much on the particular, as it’s a pathway towards something universal, even if he never quite gets there.
I don't really disagree with what he's saying. He assumes subjectivity as the default and tries to achieve the impossible objectivity. What I'm challenging is the directionality: I think in a different culture, say a very collectivist one, a writer might start from a place of objectivity (shared truth), and try to find some kind of private truth, something only they know. And that would be equally unattainable.
Oh, I follow that better. What you’re describing sounds a lot like epic poetry, where the poet would work within a shared tradition and a known story, but perform it orally in their own way.
You are perhaps unfamiliar with Laurent Binet, Benjamin Labbatut, Andre Breton (see my piece on Nadja here at RoL), James Agee, Javier Cercas, and Mailer's Armies of the Night or Rodolfo Walsh's Operation Massacre, all workers and works of the "non-fiction novel tradition" that in the US is traceable from Hiroshima and In Cold Blood. it really isn't an either/or thing and this reduction of all of modernism to a focus on subjectivity only is really a badly thought out take that should die in a fire even if of course it is not "wrong" that the plumbing of the subjective was an important element of the shift.
I agree it isn't an either/or thing. I never said subjectivity was bad, I said writers should think about how to incorporate more objectivity going forward. I never said they should abandon subjectivity and replace in with objectivity. Just mix it up a bit.
The modernist writers grew up reading 19th century literature, and they learned a lot from it, but they moved away from it by incorporating subjectivity.
100 years later, the writers of today have grown up in a tradition of increasingly radical subjectivity. They should learn the lessons of that tradition, but move away from it by incorporating some objectivity.
> this reduction of all of modernism to a focus on subjectivity only is really a badly thought out take that should die in a fire even if of course it is not "wrong"
I'm glad you think I'm not "wrong."
Neither are you right though. The Objectivists would quibble with your description of their project since they were modernists but also not concerned with subjectivity. For that matter, Dos Passos was pretty disinterested in it.
It's true, I'm neither wrong nor right. I'm best understood in apophatic terms.
As a Social Novel Enjoyer being obliquely responded to here, I'll weigh in and say a lot of what I don't like about the autofiction era just comes down to whether it excites me and gets me high on life and art or whether it leaves me vaguely depressed. While I'm not unsympathetic to the goals of the project as a whole that you describe here, what I fail to see is why it necessarily has to manifest itself in very flat, terse prose, in aphoristic little paragraphs, in banal descriptions meant to defamiliarize. Therein lies the difference, I think, between the crew you describe and autobiographical or semi-autobiographical work like On the Road, Herzog, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, my beloved New Journalism etc. All of those I feel deeply believe in literature as a form and when I think of them I can remember how electric and alive they felt in my hands and how they made me look around and see every leaf on every tree anew.
Whereas around when I was just becoming aware of modern fiction, the fiction itself was giving me the impression that it was a spent force, that it was confused about the role of literature itself, that it was floundering around with a lack of purpose. And that didn't make me want to write and didn't make me want to read. Ultimately I feel like it's useful to do some questioning of the distinction between reality and artifice and the limits of the form, and to point out that a painting of a horse is not a horse at all but an arrangement of colors and shapes, but if that takes over as an aesthetic impulse it's like, well, why should anyone do anything at all. I remember reading Olivia Laing's Crudo, I had really loved her first (straight memoir) book, and deeply deeply hating it and just being like if this is what modern literature is-- little paragraphs about how it feels to read tweets about Trump and Brexit-- we're completely fucked. Ultimately you have to have confidence in what you're doing. I don't feel this way about Knausgaard or Ferrante, who will outlast their times-- they clearly have It, whatever It is-- but I do feel it about the second rank and below.
I don’t doubt that there’s bad autofiction but a lot of the criticisms leveled at it never made sense to me because they don’t ring true for people like Knausgaard (as you point out). I’ve never read Crudo so maybe I’ve just avoided the bad stuff, although from your description it sounds more like what I’d call an “internet novel,” which I also dislike and wrote a piece on (mainly mentioning Oyler’s Fake Accounts). Books about being on the internet are usually pretty bad imo, and maybe there’s some autofiction that falls into this category, but not the authors I mention here. In any case I’ve appreciated the back and forth and it’s been very thought provoking for me.
The lines between autobiography and novel have been blurred since the beginning of the novel—books like Robinson Crusoe were originally taken by readers to be real-life accounts instead of fictional stories, so it's interesting to see so much discussion about autofiction when I don't know if it's such a leap after all.
“So what of autofiction in 2025? Knausgaard, Cusk, and Ferrante, in their recent work, seem to be writing more traditional fiction. Is autofiction over?”
I think it’s clear now that autofiction has been around forever, but as the essay points out it’s focused “resurgence” brought it to the forefront to create all the discourse you’re addressing. My hope is that “autofiction” by any stretch of a definition becomes so normalized in a way, or readers desensitized to it, that anyone that’s interested in writing auto or meta fiction will be able to experiment and try and push the form further (not sure what that looks like) instead of being written off. For whatever reason, the autobiographical mode is received well by the public and is par for the course in other media (sitcom/comedy, rap, podcasts, etc.,).
Anyway, great essay!
It sounds like autofiction is mainly being criticized for timidity and lack of imagination - charges which can be levelled against literature of any genre. But as many have pointed out, it's questionable if autofiction even makes sense as a distinct genre, because elements of it have existed in fiction for centuries.
More recently: was Saul Bellow doing autofiction when he wrote "Ravelstein," which is officially a novel ("this is a work of fiction" says the usual don't-sue-me disclaimer at the front) but is really lightly fictionalized autobiography? How about WG Sebald? I've never seen him accused of being an autofictionist, but he certainly fits the criteria. Houllebecq didn't just put himself into "The Map and the Territory" as a character, he made himself the victim of a gruesome murder. This is autofiction of an imaginative and risk-taking character.
So I think criticism of autofiction mainly falls within the basic parameters of Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap," including, by implication, autofiction).
I really love this! Thanks so much for writing it!
Great work as always. (I'm dropped in here from May, 2026 link. I missed this article somehow.)
I'm a fan of the "hysterical realism" authors, read all their books. The idea that they lack a human heart is preposterous.
The heart and the mind are hopelessly intertwined.
Decades ago I got an English degree, and it put me off reading novels for years afterward. My brain was rotted from years of reading peole talking "about" fiction when the only answer to a novel is another novel. Otherwise it's like "dancing about architecture". 😉
Thanks, flipshod, appreciate the comment. On "hysterical realism" authors, I've been meaning to finally read Infinite Jest, almost bought it the other day as all the stores have the new 30th anniversary edition.
And I'm waiting for your first post of 2026...(enjoyed the couple articles you posted last year).
Only a little less than halfway through. Good stuff. But my question has been and remains: how is this different from memoir? No one I have read who is writing about auto fiction seems to really want to or be able to differentiate the two forms. I may be wrong about this, but I am beginning to wonder if memoir is being (willfully or otherwise) misunderstood or underestimated. Thoughts?
I write a bit about this in the second half of the essay.
I’ll keep reading
I must come back to this to read more closely, but at a glance there seems a large piece of the puzzle missing: the French. Well before the recent vogue for "autofiction" in the Anglo world, including in the translations mentioned (Knausy and Ferrante), it was already an ubiquitous and tired mode in France, pioneered by such luminaries as Annie Ernaux (Nobel laureate no less!) and carried on to tedious extremes by many many others. I'm pretty sure "autofiction" is itself a French coinage. Seems weird to discuss the genre without reference to French literature.. Except that no-one gives a shit about French literature anywhere but France anymore. Even I don't, and I live there and studied French lit for my PhD...
Ya, you’re right. My intention wasn’t to give a history of autofiction but to really focus on what became a phenomenon in the Anglo lit scene for a certain period. There are a lot of pieces that do go into the history, usually citing the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 with coining the term. But I’ve also found a source that says it appears a few years earlier in English in a NYT review. I also studied French and lived in France for a bit, have written about contemporary authors like Houellebecq and Modiano, but, well, you can’t include everything. I take your point though.
Thanks for a very good introduction to autofiction, a topic I haven't studied, but which always hovers in the back of your head, whether you read Cervantes, Dickens, di Lampedusa, Maugham, Stendhal, Strindberg, Tolstoy, and Verghese. Personally, I prefer stories that feel real, but reality can be awfully boring why writers use literary license. Authors are not reporters or court stenographers. They work with what they have experienced, learned, and stuff they invent. If it's well done, it captures the reader's interest, and sometimes provides deep insights into life and society that besides entertainment can have an impact on the reader's life. That's my two cents....
A recent example of Latin American autofiction is Ricardo Piglia's "The Diaries of Emilio Renzi." Adam Thirlwell reviewed the first volume in The New York Review (July 19, 2018). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/emilio-renzi-imaginary-conspiracies/
Thanks, Hans, I haven’t heard of this one.
Very nice piece
Why are people acting like auto fiction is new? Faulkner Hemingway Wolfe Fitzgerald Maugham — everyone
I've no problem with a reader doing a dnf if they find the book unbearable. I have a big problem with people criticising a book that they haven't read. Although I suspect that Dan Brown's output might be terrible, I can't confirm that until I've actually read it (which will hopefully be never). So I withhold my judgement until I'm trapped in a lift with it or held in a hostage situation with the armed author.
Did you know that for forty years, there were gold, silver and bronze medals for poetry? Also painting, sculpture, architecture and music. All of the gold medalists submitted objectively better work than their other competitors because they have a gold medal to prove it. This is the objectivity argument in a nutshell, and probably one of the reasons that they dropped poetry and the arts from the Olympic games. Interestingly, they were dropped by one Avery Brundage, who had submitted his poetry in two previous Olympics but failed to win a medal. Clearly a case of 'if you can't win 'em, beat 'em'.
I love Beckett's work, for very different reasons that I love DFWs work, and the same is true of Borges, Calvino, Pessoa etc. I can see why people hate DFW (I'll never read the first half of The Pale King again), but the people who think they know what his work is without actually trying to read it are just inverted versions of the same posers who pretend to read his stuff because the books weigh a lot. They should provide alternate covers for his books with hard core porn titles, just so readers like me can avoid either type of poser. I missed out on the 90s hype around his work because I was bringing up kids and had no time to read anything, so I can to IJ with no idea what it was. I suspect that the hate heaped upon him is a reaction to that. DFWs essays on the State Fair and cruise liners are amazing, very different to his fiction.
I agree that art is better than porn, but if people are looking for porn and they find Kafka they're going to be disappointed. Although I'm not kink-shaming Kafka-porn enthusiasts, if they exist. They should maybe seek help though.
This seems like some bogus label some editor or someone has decided to place on fiction. It seems to me that fiction itself is all autofiction. Everyone is writing auto fiction in my opinion because they have to imagine their characters in mundane and extreme situations alike, to see how that character would react. How are they going to know what emotion to feel – from their own lives, of course, or gleaned from someone very close to them (close enough that the author can get some insight into their psyche). If you don't want to be labeled this unnecessary label of an auto-fiction-er, don't write in first-person. That'll likely help with some of the mis-labeling.
Read the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sprawling autobiography. Didn’t seem too different from Ham on Rye or Death on the Installment Plan. I didn’t think he’d done anything new. I did feel like he pulled me into his experience sufficiently enough. But damn, to ride that gravy train into six volumes? That’s what happens when you marry your editor.