Creative Digest #3: writing from personal experience; research-driven novels; the challenge of autofiction
The third edition of our departmental Substack looks at different approaches to using real life in fiction, from research-based novels to autofiction
Welcome back to Creative Digest, the new Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. In this edition you’ll find:
Jessica Andrews, on writing semi-autobiographical novels
Joe Thomas, on the mechanics and apparatus of fact-based fiction
Rebecca Tamás, on Knausgaard and the the risks of autofiction
We hope you enjoy it!
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On Writing from personal experience
By Jessica Andrews
I am often asked by readers about the implications of writing from lived experience. I am primarily a novelist, working with the realm of fiction, but elements of my work are slippery with porous boundaries. My first novel, Saltwater is rooted in semi-autobiographical material, which I decided to speak openly about during book promotion, as a means of claiming presence. My second novel, Milk Teeth includes heavily fictionalised elements of autobiography; my characters are composites of people and ideas, and the places they inhabit are based in reality, yet depicted through my protagonist’s heightened emotions and sensations, as opposed to real-world accuracy. This definition could be widely applied to works of fiction, yet I have also written non-fiction essays and articles about aspects of my life, which confuses readers further. Which parts are true? people ask me, hungrily. Did all those things really happen to you?
Most of us are hooked by the promise of a true story. We have an appetite for true crime, autobiography, biopics and sensational tabloid memoirs. We want something to be true because it feels more real to us. We don’t want to be lied to. The best stories hold truths about the ways we live and we wanted to feel connected to them, comforted by the knowledge that the complex web of thoughts and emotions we experience through literature really happened to another person, just as they happened to us. We reach for language which accurately describes sensations we have felt but could never find the words for. Our fascination with ‘true’ stories is a method of pulling heat and heaviness out of our bodies, so that we no longer have to carry it alone.
I am deeply compelled by our relationship to fiction and truth. In 1995, Dave Pelzer published a memoir of childhood abuse titled, A Child Called ‘It’: One Child’s Courage to Survive, which was a New York Times bestseller for several years. The book describes the severe emotional and physical abuse Pelzer suffered at the hands of his mother, and its success is partly attributed to the story’s resonance with other survivors of abuse. In 2002, author Pat Jordan questioned the reliability of Pelzer’s recollections, in a piece for the New York Times. Members of Pelzer’s family began to publicly dispute his book and one of his younger brothers denied the abuse took place. These allegations caused huge controversy; people were outraged at the possibility that they might have been lied to.
This particular case is complex: violent abuse is depicted in gruelling detail, and if these incidents were found to be fictional, it could be argued that Pelzer profited from sensationalising a false account of trauma, which raises ethical questions. Yet, the controversy surrounding the memoir illuminates interesting ideas about our belief in the boundaries between truth and fiction. Does the potential fabrication or exaggeration of the story negate the emotional truth within it? If the book was revealed to be entirely fictional, would the emotions it provoked in readers be any less real?
Fiction often feels real to us because it contains emotional truth within it. The events, characters, or places within a novel might be imaginary, but if the feelings it evokes are true to life, or illuminate a truth about the way we live, this provides a satisfying reading experience. Yet, some readers feel secure in the knowledge that the material they are reading is entirely fictional. The imaginary world allows them to explore emotions and ideas from a place of safety, where the stakes are lower than in reality. Recently, a friend said to me, I had to stop reading your book because it felt like I was prying. I had such intimate access to your thoughts that it made me uncomfortable. I felt like an intruder.
This response, from a person I know well, highlights interesting aspects of the separation between author and narrator, and how this links to the story’s plausibility. Of course, my friend was not intruding, and he did not really have access to my own inner thoughts. After all, he was reading a novel, as opposed to a diary, which took years of craft and many rounds of editorial work. The narrator is a character and her experiences are fictional. Although her layers of thought and feeling are spun from a deep place inside of me, they are hooked to a story, with particular themes and narrative questions and crafted into a formal framework which gives them distance from my own direct experiences. I wonder: would this reader have had the same response if they didn’t know me personally? If a reader deems a novel to be too true, is this a marker of success or failure? Has the author succeeded in crafting a voice that feels true to life? Or is her story impeded by the lack of narrative distance, forcing the reader to confront aspects of herself (themselves?) that feel too cloying and raw.
Later in this newsletter Rebecca writes about autofiction. It’s a term I am reluctant to apply to my own work. I’m more interested in the mechanics of the novel and the power of the fictional world creating an archive of reality. In my daily life, I am bound by the constraints of my own experiences and circumstances, whereas the realm of fiction offers me freedom. There are complex questions around gender, fiction and autobiography; the notion that a woman might dare to write from her direct experience is often used to diminish her work.
One of the best parts of being a novelist is having the freedom to invent things. There is power in manipulating life on your own terms, pulling the reader into your skin and showing them the world through your perspective. As writers, our relationship to truth is fluid and subjective and my own relationship to these questions changes with every new project. As both readers and writers, we ought to interrogate our own understanding of fiction and truth. What kinds of restrictions are you placing on yourself? What are you afraid of? How close to lived experience or pure fantasy do you need to be, in order to capture a truth?
What is Bent? On writing fiction based on fact
By Joe Thomas
My novels are based on real-life, historical events and weave fictional narratives around real people and real crimes. In my novels, I include detailed author forwards, acknowledgements, bibliographies, and notes, itemising where fact and fiction meet, where they diverge, the key principle being transparency. I want the reader to be able to see exactly what I have done. Ethical, legal and copyright questions keep me up at night; by being as rigorous as I can, I can write these novels in good faith. I’m often asked about this process at events or by students. Here’s something I wrote – but never published anywhere – about the process and my standalone novel Bent.
What is Bent?
Bent is a crime novel. Bent is a historical novel. Bent is a biographical novel. Bent is a non-fiction novel. Bent, according to one review, is part-memoir, part-fiction. I call Bent, in my bibliography, a fiction based on fact. Bent is a novel.
I see Bent as part of a tradition whose contemporary exponents include David Peace, Julian Barnes, Amy Sackville, and Olivia Laing, to name just four, writers who have written recent novels featuring Brian Clough, Akutagawa, Shostakovich, Velazquez, and Kathy Acker.
Writing Bent, I was very aware of my sources, of my research, of the facts I wanted to stick closely to. The book moves between three parts: a framing ‘memoir’ written in the first person by ‘me’, the author; a close, third person narrative depicting events involving Harold Challenor in 1963 in Soho; a second person, inner voice narrative, which is an imagined account of some of Challenor’s exploits in the SAS, specifically his time behind the lines in Italy, as well as action he saw with my grandfather in and around France.
I followed a similar process for the two sections outside of the framing memoir narrative, which is almost entirely based on my own recollections. I didn’t ever consider this section to be autofiction; I feel it’s clearly distinguished as passages of memoir within a novel, clear lines delineated, transparent. Perhaps autofiction is about playing with these lines, or making the line somehow imperceptible?
In my bibliography, I establish the sources that I consulted and used. Following the bibliography is a ‘Notes’ section where I show which parts of the novel – specific lines, some dialogue, references to newspaper reports, for example – are taken, or adapted, from other texts.
The sections in Soho have a number of lines of dialogue which appear in a number of non-fiction texts: it was my research that found this corroboration, and my understanding that these lines came from court proceedings and an inquiry into the Challenor affair. It seems to me an excellent way to create credible and authentic dialogue; and the lines are attributed as thoroughly and rigorously as they can be. The facts of Challenor’s downfall, as I understand them, are established in these key texts. I read other fiction and non-fiction and watched films of and about the period to sharpen dialogue and speech patterns and idiomatic usage of the time.
The sections in Italy are based on Challenor’s own account of this adventure in his memoir, the stories my grandfather and grandmother – and Challenor – told me, as well as several other sources noted in the bibliography, most usefully Roy Farran’s Winged Dagger. The Italian sections are written as Challenor’s imagined, fictionalised inner voice, in the second person. I wanted to reimagine his experience as closely as possible in a fictional context. There are, as in the Soho sections, a number of quoted lines, principally dialogue. To create Challenor’s inner voice, while accurately reproducing the historical facts – and in this case my understanding of the historical facts is precisely and specifically Challenor’s experience –I immersed myself in his memoir. I took the framework of the events in Italy – approximately thirty pages of the memoir – adapted the chronology, studied his depiction of them, and made literary-language choices designed to create this fictional inner voice and adhere to the historical facts as I understand them. I consulted other sources named in my bibliography to assist in understanding what it means to be behind the lines; as I state in the Notes section, my grandfather’s experiences were invaluable to this end.
I thought carefully about these elements of research, sought advice, and concluded that my Author’s Note, Bibliography, and Notes sections are transparent on the sources I have used and how I have used them. My novel – to quote another review – is a fictional reimagining of parts of Challenor’s life. Writing it transformed the source material.
What is Autofiction? Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’ series
By Rebecca Tamás
Recently you may have heard many novels, by writers such as Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk and Teju Cole, referred to as Autofiction— part of a literary genre that seems to be on the cutting edge of fiction today. But what is it?
Autofiction is a genre where the events and characters are based on the author’s real life, but there are fictionalized elements. In autofiction, the central character might have the same name and general life story as the author, or a different name and a similar life story. The genre is extremely porous, and there is fierce debate about which books should be included under it! For example, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s bestselling 6 volumes of memoir, ‘My Struggle,’ translated from Norwegian into English by Don Bartlett, and published between 2009 and 2011, read like pure autobiography – the detail is unbelievably rich. But it is in this ‘realism’ that the artifice exists. Knausgaard himself has admitted that if he couldn’t remember something in detail, he simply invented the memory. In this way the book is an autofictional mash up of autobiography and novel.
The series tells the life story of a 40-year-old Norwegian writer called Karl Ove Knausgaard and stints on none of the repetition and banality of daily life. Knausgaard describes the aimlessness and drama of childhood, the endless small tasks of parenting young children, drunken university nights and the most intimate aspects of his and his family’s life in great, at times obsessive, detail. Knausgaard has said that he wrote the books fast to prevent himself rethinking, revising, or otherwise transforming the texts into literature: “We need to be alert whenever events shape themselves into narratives, for narratives belong to literature and not to life.” Writer Hari Kunzru reflects on Knausgaard’s process saying: ‘He does all the stuff you’re not supposed to do. He risked being boring at every turn. He has the courage to say, ‘My ordinary life as a father in a regional town is going to be enough to hold the reader’s attention.’”
Knausgaard’s book has many elements we associate with a traditional autobiography – it reflects on his childhood, youth and family; and considers his personal and emotional development. It uses real place names, real people and real events. However, Knausgaard's autofiction is not written by someone who is obviously ‘notable’ or famous – his life is not full of unusual adventure. Knausgaard shows us the fascination, pain, suffering, pathos and intensity of an ‘ordinary’ life. He doesn’t just focus on the ‘big’ events of his life either– he makes room for the mundanity of repetitive thoughts, banal actions, eating, sleeping, longing and waiting. For Knausgaard, human life itself is fascinating in all its banality and complexity. Here the minutiae of an ordinary life becomes art, takes on the glint of the meaningful and profound. In the incredibly detailed writing of the book, we feel we are getting the holistic truth – but this is in itself fiction. Knausgaard is not ‘reporting’ on reality factually, rather his innovative writing creates the experience of reality for his readers. Thus, we understand that autofiction is not ‘fake autobiography:’ rather it is a version of autobiography that reflects the partiality and subjectivity of the ways in which we understand our own lives.
It is however important to consider, as noted by Jessica Andrews in her piece, that autofiction can be a label that’s assigned to writers in a way that undermines their aims. Knausgaard is clear that his work involves a lot of memoir elements – he doesn’t call it fiction. But often novelists, and especially female novelists, who may have a similarity to their characters on the surface are assigned the genre of autofiction, even if it doesn’t resonate form them. An example of this is the writer Sheila Heti, whose novel ‘Motherhood’ was assumed to be autofiction. I saw a talk with Heti, where she was asked ‘Why do you call this a novel when it’s clearly based on your own life?’ rightly annoyed, Heti responded – ‘It’s a novel because I say it is.’ Autofiction is an exciting genre, but it is a form that we should use to understand what a writer is trying to achieve; and how they are trying to experiment with the shape of autobiography, rather than a label we stick on any novel we suspect might be drawing from life!
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Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
And find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here - including an open evening tonight!
Contributing writers:
Jessica Andrews is the author of Milk Teeth and Saltwater, both published by Hodder & Stoughton. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons.
Joe Thomas is the author of White Riot, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, and is excited to teach the Creative Writing Workshop module, and Working as a Writer, an industry guide for writers.
Rebecca Tamás is the author of Strangers and Witch, and co-editor of Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing.
Department news:
Joe Thomas’s next novel, Red Menace, will be published in February 2024 by Quercus. It follows White Riot as the second in a trilogy of novels set in East London, and will be followed by True Blue.
Lecturer in Creative Writing Deepa Anappara's second novel titled The Last of Earth, set in mid-nineteenth century Tibet, will be published by Oneworld in the UK in March 2025, and by Random House in the US. More details can be found here.
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Three very interesting pieces here. Thanks very much.