The Cure for Autofiction
Finding remedy for the Künstlerroman in 3 novellas about non-literary labor
Pete on Goodreads gives Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch a 5-star rating, declaring “this is like the cure to autofiction.” I’ve never thought of autofiction as needing a cure, and still, Pete’s assessment has stuck with me. What is it that’s fatigued him, and how is it that Scanlan has managed to provide an antidote?
Autofiction is a genre of fiction characterized by narrators who strongly resemble their authors (and sometimes share their names), but its distinction from memoir allows writers a level of creative freedom. Made popular in the 2010s by authors such as Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Tao Lin, the trend seemed to cumulate with French writer Annie Ernaux’s 2022 Nobel win for her decade-spanning body of work that includes novels and novellas about her parents and childhood, her illegal abortion in the 60s, her lovers and affairs—all under the loosest possible guise of fiction.1
Just a few months before Ernaux’s win, writer Sanjena Sathian opened a short essay for The Drift by saying, “These days, in the literary world, the only thing trendier and triter than writing autofiction is hating autofiction.” Sathian cites a slew of articles about autofiction’s descent, or at least its slow transformation, and considers the core of autofiction’s project, the limited “I.” Another trademark of autofiction is simply that it’s written by writers. As a result, its narrators attend literary festivals (Cusk), sit in front of their laptops to ruminate over their work (Knausgaard), and grapple with manuscript deadlines (Zambreno). Maybe it’s this generally unrelatable, relatively limited scope that Pete on Goodreads, or Sathian’s sources, have ended up finding tiring.
The three novellas I’m recommending this week feature main characters with specialized professions less often found in fiction, giving readers the opportunity to glean insight from experiences and environments outside the literary purview of the Künstlerroman2.
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan (New Directions, 2022)
Scanlan’s Kick the Latch, much like her debut3, is the translation of a stranger’s life into narrative; it’s the product of three interviews with a horse trainer named Sonia, out of which Scanlan renders an arresting, candid voice into ordered anecdotes: a rural girlhood, the shooting of an injured horse, the trailers of jockeys and trainers moving cross-country from race to race, a sexual assault, a romance, the drunkards, and the dirty work. The responsibility, the dedication. And of course, the animals—elegant and powerful. It’s the Wild West; it’s an average day in the life.
Sonia, our horse trainer heroine, is a highly accomplished professional of the type whose body of knowledge and experiences doesn’t often land in literary fiction, and the novella’s close relationship to reality makes its strangest and most distinct moments all the more outstanding. We start out of the gates blazing with a memory about Bicycle Jenny, a gardener and handywoman from Sonia’s childhood:
When the weather was warm she bathed in the creek or ponds, but in winter she reeked. Most of the boys in our neighborhood, the first naked woman they seen was Bicycle Jenny taking a bath in the goldfish ponds.
She had a lot of dogs—little yipping chihuahuas—and a chicken wire fence to keep them in. I’m talking sixty, seventy chihuahuas without stretching it a bit. She always said she had a hundred.4
If autofiction paints a veneer of fiction over its author’s life, would that make Kick the Latch something like biografiction? It’s a true and authentic biographic record that’s simultaneously stylized, prioritizing essence over fact. In another Drift article, critic Christian Lorentzen conjectures that the 2010s-style genre of autofiction emerged only after memoir expanded beyond the realm of celebrity and into the commercial; stories of “regular” people became worth telling and publishing. Kick the Latch, then, could be an example of biography expanding beyond the realms of celebrity and history. Scanlan shows that paying due attention to traditionally undocumented lives as they’re being lived is a worthwhile feat.
Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp, translated by Jo Heinrich (Peirene Press, 2022)
In the first German course I took in college, my professor assigned each of us a presentation on a Kiez, or neighborhood, of Berlin. My powerpoint took classmates on a Spaziergang through Marzahn, discussed the neighborhood’s GDR history, featured images of its sprawling East German Plattenbau apartment blocks, and mentioned museum-like preserved units open to visitors. Oskamp’s first novel translated into English brings readers into the lives and stories of the residents of Marzahn today, through the care and attention of its narrator’s niche profession.
The Dublin Literary Award-winning Marzahn, Mon Amour is narrated by a woman who’s reached middle age. The narrator isn’t named, she used to be a writer, and she shares traits with the author, but the novel isn’t about her writing. Rather, it’s about the ways she’s chosen to move on from writing and engage with “the real world.” She’s training to become a podiatrist, then becomes one, and the novella’s core lies within the stories of the clients whose feet she works with and the women she works alongside.
There’s technical foot talk, about tools and tasks, scrubbing dead skin and trimming toenails, but as the narrator gets to know her regulars, so do readers. Most of the foot clinic’s clientele are elderly and have rich histories as they open up: one woman was an East Prussian refugee as a girl, one man the son of traveling circus performers. The narrator herself is a writer turned listener. She collects memories, stories, and experiences, all of which form a larger picture of the way we build, deconstruct, and rebuild our personal and collective identities across time.
LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin (MCD x FSG, 2021)
If the first of this week’s picks was for the animal lover and the second for the people person, LaserWriter II is for the tech-savvy. Tamara Shopsin’s debut is the portrait of a place rather than a person. Nineteen-year-old Claire is job-hunting in 90s Manhattan when she lands a position at one of the first independent Macintosh repair shops, Tekserve. As she learns the ins and outs of the computers—from the Quadra 700 and PowerBook 1400 to the novella’s namesake LaserWriter II—Claire finds belonging in “a space that was as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine.”5
LaserWriter II, like the novellas above, is compact—no more than 200 pages—but it’s ripe with specificity and expertise, tossing readers into a unique, bohemian whirlwind of early Apple lore and geek lingo. Interwoven with Claire’s story are fable-like accounts of Apple’s origins, featuring Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; shop visits by New York City celebs; and sparkling passages where computer parts become sentient (and even quote Susan Sontag).
Shopsin, herself an “illustrator, designer, author, griddle cook,” brings whimsy and depth to an unexpected workplace setting. Earlier this year, I spoke with author Jessi Jezweska Stevens about her new story collection and asked about the influence of her journalism on her fiction. She responded, “I think it’s easy to underestimate how fascinating it is to learn something from fiction, too. It’s attractive when there’s a bit of expertise about some niche on the page.” Which, I think, is exactly what Shopsin—and Scanlan, and Oskamp—have managed to accomplish.
In two weeks, the next installment in my recommendation series will be landing in your inbox; its theme is “Summer Reading List.”
If you’re looking for more in the meantime…
A few months ago, I came across the Syllabus Project, a website / newsletter that shares weekly syllabi by contributors, with topics ranging from representations of art in cinema to rock collections to sex work in literature throughout history. A favorite of mine—and great place to start—is Shea Fitzpatrick’s syllabus on the Pleasure x Effort Matrix. I also recently read, loved, and learned something from Lily Meyer’s A Syllabus for Thinking About America.
And a film recommendation: I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Challengers—or listening to its soundtrack—since I saw it in theaters last month.
In a Paris Review essay about Ernaux and autofiction, Lauren Elkin writes, “Ernaux is interested in the truth of experience, whatever form that might take, and this is what sets her work apart from autobiography or conventional memoir.”
While a Bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story more broadly, a Künstlerroman deals specifically with the maturation of an artist / writer.
Scanlan’s first book, Aug 9—Fog (MCD x FSG, 2019), grew out of an 87-year-old woman’s diary, which Scanlan came across at a small-town estate sale. She edited, collaged, and reworked the sentences that inspired her most, building the portrait of an life out of mundane, mesmerizing fragments.
Tekserve was a real place! Although it sadly closed in 2016.