Forst intends to subvert your idea of autofiction and replace it with a more flexible, expansive definition. It’s a strange piece that suspends what we expect in an anthology labeled as autofiction - or really the short story as a whole - and embodies a conceptual makeup of several motifs rippling through a text. The excerpt from Rindon Johnson’s forthcoming novel, And If I Could, I Truly Would, is not what you typically describe as autofiction: it consists of fractured paragraphs, poems, and repeated imagery, which together form this cohesive yet nonlinear meditation on race, capitalism’s effect on the body, leather, Black Panther, and form fitting content. The collection does not include, nor comment on, the tradition of autofiction (except for a pithy phrase in the opening pages), choosing instead to highlight contemporary work, either in veins that would be readily identified as autofiction or in pieces that divert off the path to create a new form entirely. NDA: An Autofiction Anthology, edited by Caitlin Forst, arrives at this crossroads for the genre. In today’s publishing climate, especially after the national trauma of the pandemic and the tragic loss of Tyrant Books editor Giancarlo DiTrapano, I wonder if autofiction is mutating into something altogether new. While most of alt-lit’s promise lies in its DIY quality and immediate cultural relevance, it often succumbs to a hollow inconsequentiality, due to its extreme contemporary lens and subjective concern. ![]() ![]() But the 2010s iteration is distinct: youthful ennui, drug-addled indulgence, and technological dependence thrashing against the bulwark of well-mannered domestic tales and academic wordplay. The progression, outlined in recent terms by Lorentzen but stretching back even further to postmodern works by John Barth or the suburban literature of John Updike, shows an increasing atomization of narrative, an academic aesthetic, and growing collective irritation at institutions historically concentrating on white male voices. In a roundup for The Drift, Christian Lorentzen tracks autofiction’s cultural antecedents from market-driven memoir through frustration with nineties and early aughts New Yorker–style fiction (like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Safran Foer) to the phenomenon of Karl Ove Knausgård. If this genre is to last, I wonder how can it evolve into something new and enticing while building from its prior form. Justin Taylor, reviewing William Brewer’s The Red Arrow, described autofiction as “a single genre with legible conventions and tropes: unnamed or coyly named narrators, flat affect, ample white space, rigorous self-surveillance (calorie and milligram counts, email and G-chat transcripts), ambiguous irony, pervasive despair, and a general inability to log off.” This could also be an adequate description of an entire generation’s neuroses. The genre is much more than this, but its appeal is tethered to our relationship with abjection and technology. Some have prophesied its demise, but readers still flock to readings and bookstores to buy the next book about a protagonist with the same name as the one on the cover. Autofiction dominated 2022 and it isn’t going anywhere soon. In autumn, an editor, agreeing with Cooper, mentioned Michel Leiris as a pioneer of this now inescapable genre. IN THE SPRING of last year, after a Forever Magazine reading at the Russian Samovar in Midtown Manhattan, one of the participants asked me, “So, like, do you write autofiction?” In the summer at a cafe in Paris, Dennis Cooper asked me, “What’s up with this love for ‘autofiction’ in the States?” He cited the French as an origin story for this popular American form.
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