In Defense of Fakeness

Arguably, no mode of writing has influenced the past decade of novels more than autofiction, a catchall term for books that call themselves fiction while claiming to be rooted, in some way, in their authors’ real lives. Amid this boom, critics and readers alike have shown a certain anxiety over how based in fact a novel can be—and how anyone might know, given that no autofiction writer purports to be telling the complete, unadulterated truth. Is reality identifiable on the page? Is it ferret-out-able? Is it relevant? As narratives professing to be true-ish gain in popularity, critics seem sometimes inclined to either or . One cynical interpretation of either impulse would be to say that, in a , everyone is comfortable assuming falsity. Another would be to see readers as a cranky panel of judges demanding sworn testimony every time they crack a book claiming to hold some similarity to the writer’s life. A fakeness. I know I do.