Some months ago, a post about Autofiction popped into my
feed. Here
it is, for reference.
Succinctly defined, it’s an autobiographical
story that is then fictionalized. In many ways all fiction draws from the
writer’s life, but in autofiction the connection is much tighter. Call it
fictionalized autobiography.
(As an aside, much in published autobiographies
is also fictionalized, as the author attempts to justify, obfuscate, and shape
their past reality— whether as an act to deceive or an act of self-deception.)
In other words, the lines are
blurry at best. Maybe this is why I was unfamiliar with the notion of “autofiction.”
My published novel, The Voice of
Thunder, was called by one reviewer “fictionalized autobiography.” Fair enough.
It began as a short non-fiction memoire and morphed way off course into fiction.
All my work draws from my life, even talking animal stories.
But just a couple of years ago I had
the true experience of writing autofiction.
An injurious event I had lived,
while deep into the Covid pandemic when the world had shut down and many suffered more real existential hardships, was the inexplicable and abrupt end of a seventeen-year
friendship. My former friend just informed me she never wanted to hear from me again,
no further explanation.
If you’ve had this happen to you,
you know how injurious this is. But it was a first for me and I was ill prepared.
In a time where social contacts were already strained by governments
everywhere, this was especially hurtful.
I had a lot of time to mull over
how I had gotten myself into this predicament, and how my judgment regarding
this friendship had been so off mark. I was eager to take responsibility in
every way I could, because I have power only over what is up to me.
Still under various degrees of
quarantine, I had the time and the impetus to try and solve this mystery by---
yup, writing a fictional story about a friendship that turned out to be an
illusion. Or was it a delusion? That was but one of the many questions.
The writing itself would reveal and
also serve to heal.
After many revisions, I’ve started querying this story, which turned out to be much more fictional on the
surface, as they all do. It’s a good story and its setting befits the world I
write about, that of much younger readers in middle school.
But the theme still holds strong.
Who is a friend? How do you know a friendship is true? What do we make of
friends who behave like frenemies?
So, before I knew the term
autofiction, I wrote it. Now I also have the writerly word for it.
