Critical autobiography as a genre

ABSTRACT

Memoir, a genre that dates back, arguably, to Augustine’s Confessions, if not even
earlier, is today enjoying enormous critical as well as popular success. In this
essay, I discuss what I see as the most recent ramification of memoir, namely the
development of a distinguishable new subgenre which I will call “critical
autobiography.” Stemming from the long and complex tradition of literary
memoirs, the critical autobiography flirts closely with fiction and literary criticism
while challenging some of the structural and aesthetic features that characterize
more traditional autobiographical works. In the course of this paper, I consider
such challenges and their impact on the nature and classification of memoir.
Grounding my analysis in genre theory (as opposed to strictly intentionalist
classificatory strategies), I outline and defend three contra-standard features of the
critical autobiography: critical autobiographies problematize the idea of an
authentic confession, they refrain from causal narrative connections, and, lastly,
they further contribute to the discussion on the nature of the self by providing a
perhaps more scattered, but nonetheless compelling picture of what a
contemporary autobiographical self may actually be.

KEYWORDS: Critical autobiography, genre theory, fiction/nonfiction, narrative

1
Introduction

Autobiographies, or, as it is today more popular, memoirs,1 The two terms,

“autobiography” and “memoir” will be used interchangeably. View all notes have
gone, in the past two decades or so, through a complete makeover. Memoir, in fact,
is nothing short of a phenomenon. What is, to wit, phenomenal about memoir is
how prismatic it is, how prone to morphing, to play, crisscross, and perhaps even
violate the boundaries and definitions that philosophy and literary criticism have,
throughout the centuries, attached to different genres—in fiction and nonfiction
alike.

Even if we agree in identifying, as its origin, St.

Augustine’s Confessions (1998Augustine. 1998. The Confessions. English
Version. Paris: Bibliotèque de la Pléiade. (and we do not have to), even if we
concede that some of the first complications emerged with Rousseau
(1953Rousseau, J.-J. 1953. Confessions. London: Penguin Books. ) and that the
first breaches to the authenticity and overall confessional intent of memoir can be
said to derive from the introduction of a “secular” dimension to what was instead
its religious beginning, even if, lastly, we see memoir shaking in front of the loss
of a coherent sense of identity in writers such as Samuel Beckett
(1984Beckett, S. 1984. Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Press. and the
postmodern movement that will later ensue, we are still left with a variety of
questions on what memoir is, on its ontology.2

I am here relying on James Olney’s analysis of the three main historical phases of
memoir.

2
For memoir, to start with, is both a literary genre and a philosophical tool, a way of
actively “doing philosophy;” it is, additionally, of special interest for psychologists
and psychoanalysts,3`. See, for instance, the work of Laura Marcus
(2014Marcus, L. 2014. Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and
Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

For a literary take on the topic see Hustvedt (2009Hustvedt, S. 2009. The Shaking
Woman or a History of My Nerves. New York: Picador. [Google Scholar]). T.View
all notes not to mention its popularity among both elite writers and the virtually
interminable sequence of politicians, athletes, music stars, etc. who have tried their
hands at it. Recent publications reflect an interest in autobiography and its inherent
multiplicity. James Olney’s masterfully written Memory & Narrative: The Wave of
Life-Writing (Olney 1998Olney, J. 1998. Memory & Narrative. the Weave of Life-
Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]) outlines the
history of autobiography as the weaving of both narrative and identity; Ben
Yagoda (2009Yagoda, B. 2009. Memoir, A History. New York: Riverhead
Books. [Google Scholar]), while also adhering to an historical approach (albeit less
rigorous), focuses more on the problem of authenticity in memoir and on how the
notion of truth has often been jeopardized. On a similar note, the New York Public
Library organized, in 1986, a series of talks entitled “The Arts and Craft of
Memoir,” talks that were later collected in a publication edited by William Zinsser
and entitled, significantly Inventing the Truth (Zinsser 1998Zinsser, W. K.,
ed. 1998. Inventing the Truth. the Art and Craft of Memoir. New York: Mariner
Books. [Google Scholar]). More recently, two collections of essays have explored
two fundamental issues in the analysis of memoir. The first, edited by Christopher
Cowley (2015Cowley, C., ed. 2015. The Philosophy of
Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]), looks at

3
the intersection between philosophy and autobiography and at the idea, briefly
mentioned above, of autobiography as a form of philosophy; the second, edited by
Zachary Leader (2015Leader, Z., ed. 2015. On Life-Writing. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. [Google Scholar]), is more wider in scope and explores the
multiple ways in which autobiographies are created, thus tracing their evolution
not only in history, as in the previous examples, but from the perspective of what it
means to write an autobiography, to be an autobiographer.

The list can go on to include more books, journals, and literary magazines, but
even just a superficial look at the chapters of each of these volumes will reveal a
number of overlapping concerns and questions. Specifically, and focusing more
narrowly, but not exclusively, on philosophical analyses of memoir, there are three
crucial issues to consider. The first is whether memoir belongs entirely to
nonfiction, or whether fiction might have, to some extent, “contaminated” it. The
second is related to the notion of narrative and to what may count as the structural
conditions leading to an autobiographical narrative (if, and I must here add a
disclaimer, we can legitimately talk about memoir as truly being a narrative).
Lastly, there is the problem of personal identity and the related question of what
counts as a self: what is an autobiographical self? Are we autobiographical selves?
Can autobiographies truly reveal something more about who we are?

In my essay, I will focus primarily on the first question, on what, from now on, I
will refer to as the “question of classification.” When compared to the other two
questions my choice of concentrating on classification might strike some, and
especially the trained analytic philosopher, as a bit odd or, at least, as a non-
particularly interesting one. After all, Gricean models, which dominate the analytic
tradition, are tremendously efficient at drawing boundaries between fiction and
nonfiction, thus leaving us with a very limited number of paradoxical cases (if
4
any). And yet, Gricean definitions, or what I will refer to as “strong classificatory”
accounts also suffer a dramatic shortcoming: they cannot account for the fluidity
and experimental courage that so many works of fiction and nonfiction have
shown. We might be able, in other words, to use a Gricean paradigm to establish
whether a partially ambiguous work should be classified as fiction or nonfiction
(take, for instance, Georges Perec’s [1975Perec, G. 1975. W, or the Memory of
Childhood. Boston: David R. Godine. [Google Scholar]] W or Pessoa’s The Book
of Disquiet[1984Pessoa, F. 1984. The Book of Disquiet. London: Penguin
Classics. [Google Scholar]]), but we have no means to explain why a growing
number of works is playing “on the edge” of this boundary. Even more
specifically, they cannot explain the centrality of this voluntary ambiguity in terms
of the structure of these works, their aesthetic features, and, lastly, their reception
and appraisal.

A not too masterful investigation into recent publications confirms this intuition.
Authors such as Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson, Ben Lerner, Helen McDonald, and
others all seem to have added to their artistic agenda the necessity to critically
question the fiction/nonfiction divide in life-writing. This essay stems from an
observation of their techniques and aesthetic devices with the scope of showing
how their efforts have not only substantially challenged and altered a more
traditional conception of memoir, but also highlighted the need of rethinking the
classification of memoir or, more modestly, of acknowledging the development of
a new subgenre, what I am tentatively calling “critical-autobiography”.

Memoir: classification and clarification

It is not uncommon, when engaging in the study of memoir, to inquire over its
epistemic status and over its relation to the notion of truth. Some of the most
5
widely known contributions to the analysis of memoir confirm this hypothesis.
Philippe Lejeune, before his most recent turn to the analysis of diaries, had
famously, but also, as we shall see, contentiously, argued 44. I will return, in the
section dedicated to genre theory, as well as in my description of the contra-
standard features of critical autobiographies, to the dense debate that followed
Lejeune’s theory.View all notes that memoirs require a pacte
autobiographique (Lejeune 1989Lejeune, P. 1989. On
Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]), a
contract that the reader establishes with the memoirist. Such a pact allows the
reader to identify what, in the text, is associated with the pronoun “I” with the
name and last name printed on the cover, while also tacitly conceding that the
reader will act as a confidant who, despite the silence to which readers are
confined, is nonetheless asked to believe in the events narrated, to identify the
portrait conveyed by the memoirist as authentic, and to eventually judge its
content. Autobiographies ask their readers to engage in a specific “mode of
reading,” one that, to reiterate the points above, combines the reader’s role as a
believer with her ability to empathize, sympathize, but also to judge and question
the content of an autobiography.

And question we did. While the origin of memoir, at least if we see in Augustine’s
work the beginning of this genre, is closely tied to the notion of truth and to the
importance of confession, later autobiographical works have amply shown how
fragile the idea that memoir, a subjective narrative, could convey objective and
verifiable truths actually was. Rousseau’s autobiographies, the Confessions,
the Dialogues, and the Reveries are often seen as the first breach into the reliability
of memoir. Matching three forms of expression, respectively, narration, dialogue,
and meditative sketches, the three works introduce us to the complexity of

6
remembering and of the difficulties inherent to the “act” of autobiography—to its
creation. Rousseau’s alternates a linear narrative, a dialectical phase in which he
compares and contrasts his own voices,55. Rousseau adopts different appellatives
to refer to himself such as “J.J,” “The Frenchman,” “Rousseau,” and “The
Judge.”View all notes and a meditative one where a “finally alone” man is brought
back to the idyllic state of nature that characterizes Rousseau’s political
philosophy. This terrific rhetorical exercise, however, is hardly for the purpose of
objective truth. Rousseau’s frequent alterations of facts and the ways in which he
mediates between those facts and his and the reader’s evaluation of them lead to a
compulsory narrative that, if not entirely fictional, is most surely not as crystalline
as the one composed by Augustine.

Rousseau’s example is indicative of the risk, in autobiographies, of outright

inventions, if not lies. Popular cases such as James Frey’s A Million Little
Pieces (2003Frey, J. 2003. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Random
House. [Google Scholar]), which became the object of public outrage and televised
apologies, are exemplary of how sensitive the issue of reliability is when dealing
with autobiography. To lie in an autobiography is to break the autobiographical
pact mentioned above; it is to break what it means to write and read an
autobiographical work.

Yet, to simply condemn every evasion from an objective rendition of facts as a lie
or to go as far as to see them as fictional is not the correct solution. For not only
not all alterations and not all distortions qualify as lies, they are often precisely
what make autobiography interesting.

It is not my goal here to do justice to this latter claim, but it may suffice to
emphasize how despite the possibility of relying on alternative sources,

7
autobiographies are heavily dependent on the autobiographer’s very ability to
remember. And yet, remembering, Antonio Damasio (1999Damasio, A. 1999. The
Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness. New York: Harcourt. [Google Scholar]), Joseph LeDoux
(1996LeDoux, J. 1996. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of
Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. [Google Scholar]), and many others
after them have amply demonstrated, is not a matter of simple recollection.
Memories change over time, and memorization is prone to subjective remodeling.
At times remodeling can be a form of protection; we tend, for instance, to remove
or mitigate painful memories from the past to the point to which we might even
deny having lived through them. Other times, the alteration of memories is dictated
by the need of “making sense” of what happened; we need, in other words, to
connect our memories into a whole, to spell out their connections, whether
etiological or of other nature, and to establish a narrative that abets our perception,
whether diachronic or episodic,66. There is an ongoing debate on whether we
perceive ourselves as diachronic or episodic beings. I will return on it in the
concluding section of this article.View all notes of life.

Memoirists are not only familiar with this aspect of memory; they have embraced
it as one of the distinguishing features of what it means to engage in
autobiography. A significant example is José Saramago’s childhood memoir, Small
Memories. In a particularly moving passage, Saramago recalls the death of his
younger brother, Francisco. When Francisco died, the author was barely two years
old, an age that simply impedes the possibility of clear recollection. And yet, his
description of the event is clear, detailed, and beautifully crafted. In a clever
stylistic move, Saramago turns here to the reader and anticipates her worry: how
can this be true? Are these memories false? I will let Saramago respond:

8
I don’t really believe in so-called false memories, I think the difference between
those and the memories we consider certain and solid is merely a question of
confidence, the confidence that we place in the incorrigible vagueness we call
certainty. Is the one memory I have of Francisco false? Perhaps, but I have spent
the last eighty-three years believing it to be true.
(Saramago 2011Saramago, J. 2011. Small Memories. A Memoir. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. [Google Scholar], 109)

And again:

As Francisco’s brother, I would have been unable to help the daring mountaineer
had he fallen. I must have been sitting on the floor, pacifier in my mouth, little
more than eighteen months old, concerned, without even realizing that I was, with
recording what I was seeing in some part of my small brain so that, a whole
lifetime later, I could describe it to you, dear reader. That, then, is my earliest
memory. And it may well be false. (Saramago 2011Saramago, J. 2011. Small
Memories. A Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. [Google Scholar], 110)

Are Saramago’s memories false? Is Rousseau a liar? And, to return to our initial
point, can an autobiography and the confession it entails be comparable, in virtue
of these ambiguities, to a work of fiction? Has our autobiographical pact been
shattered and replaced with the make-believe activity associated with fictional
works?

All these questions are related to what in my introduction I referred to as the

“question of classification,” namely the question of whether a specific genre, and,
in our case, memoir, can be classified as a work of fiction or as a work of
nonfiction.

9
In the analytic tradition, accounts dealing with the fiction/nonfiction distinction
typically stem from a rejection of the postmodern collapse of fiction and nonfiction
defended by Roland Barthes (1977Barthes, R. 1977. Image – Music – Text. New
York: Noonday Press. [Google Scholar]), Hayden White (1970White, H. 1970.
“Literary History: The Point of It All.” New Literary History 2 (1): 173–185.
doi:10.2307/468595. [Google Scholar], 1980White, H. 1980. “The Value of
Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27. On
Narrative. doi:10.1086/448086. [Google Scholar], 1981White, H. 1981. “The
Narrativization of Real Events.” Critical Inquiry 7 (4): 793–798.
doi:10.1086/448133. [Google Scholar]), and others. To such accounts, scholars
such as Gregory Currie (1985Currie, G. 1985. “What Is Fiction?” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism43 (4): 385. doi:10.2307/429900. [Google Scholar]),
Kendall Walton (1990Walton, K. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the
Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. [Google Scholar]), and Noël Carroll (2003Carroll, N. 2003. “Fiction,
Nonfiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: Conceptual Analyses.”
In Engaging the Moving Image, 1–12. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google
Scholar], 193–224) have responded by focusing on the nature of illocutionary acts
in everyday language—which they frame in Gricean terms—and on the
adjustments necessary in order to apply such a model to the case of fictional and
nonfictional works. It is not my goal to provide a fine-grained review of all these
accounts; suffice it to say, that they typically rely on both authorial intention and
on the ability of readers (or audiences in general) to receive, understand, and
respond to such intentions. Gregory Currie’s account, for example, frames the
author of fiction as expressing the intention that the audiences will make-believe
the text, while understands nonfictional works as mandating us to believe that what
is communicated is real and therefore qualifies as a “true” belief—or at least as a
10
belief that is truly held by the author. Interestingly for our purposes, Currie also
digresses on the advantages of his position in presumably difficult cases such
invented, and yet, highly realistic or verisimilar autobiographies.

Martin Amis’ The House of Meetings (2007Amis, M. 2007. The House of

Meetings. New York: Alfred. A. Knopf. [Google Scholar]), Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight Children(1981Rushdie, S. 1981. Midnight’s
Children. London: Jonathan Cape, Random House. [Google Scholar]), and Ohran
Pamuk’s My Name is Red (2001Pamuk, O. 2001. My Name Is Red. New
York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. [Google Scholar]), to only mention a
few, are all examples of highly realistic autobiographical stories that might strike
the uninformed reader as works of nonfiction: after all, there are no structural
differences that we can eyeball and the content is as realistic as any nonfictional
work. But classificatory accounts can be of help. For the distinction between
fiction and nonfiction is not taken to depend on the relative reliability of content; it
is instead ascribed to the relational properties that connect the content to the way it
is received. The distinction between a fictional memoir and an actual memoir is
then that in the former there is no intention of preserving what Currie calls an
“information preserving chain,” i.e. there is no desire to relate the events back to
what truly happened and is known about the real world. A realistic memoir,
deprived of the intention of portraying something true about the author is therefore
comparable to a work of fiction, no matter how plausible the narrative may sound.
By the same token, a memoir that includes unlikely events—such as the example I
took from Saramago’s childhood memoir—remains a memoir in virtue of its
intention to authentically77. “Authentic” unlike “true” is not easily confused with
an epistemic notion of true where a true assertion is seen as stemming from a true
and justified beliefs. An authentic statement might not be objectively true, but it

11
can, as in the case of Saramago’s memoir, be subjectively true and
significant.View all notes characterize the author.

Is this solution acceptable and exhaustive? And, more importantly for our
purposes, is it enough to classify the “new wave” of autobiographies that I have
introduced at the end of my introduction as distinctively nonfictional, or fictional,
works?

There are, broadly, two ways of responding to “intentionalist” strategies such as

the one outlined by Currie. The first, which, however, I will only briefly mention
here, is to contest the importance and value given to the role of intention in matters
of classification, but also, as Berys Gaut has shown, in matters of interpretation
(Gaut 1993Gaut, B. 1993. “Interpreting the Arts: The Patchwork Theory.” Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (4): 597–609. doi:10.2307/431892. [Google
Scholar], 597–609). A second strategy, on which I will focus more closely, is to
question whether classificatory accounts can truly exhaust the discussion ensuing
from the debate on the fiction/nonfiction divide, and this largely regardless of our
willingness to accept their tenets. Specifically, proponents of this latter strategy,
point at the inability of classificatory accounts to explain how a given classification
can affect the reader’s understanding and evaluation of a work. I will refer to this
latter approach as a “clarificationist” rather than as a “classificatory” one in virtue
of its ability to clarify the status of fictional and nonfictional works when dealing
with matters of interpretation and assessment.

Clarificationist strategies can, I believe, help us better understand the impact of the
new wave of autobiographies that I have introduced earlier, and this because,
despite their differences, all these works consciously avoid being segregated into a
tight classification. Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person

12
Be? (2012Heti, S. 2012. How Should a Person Be? New York: Henry Holt and
Company. [Google Scholar]) for instance, declares itself to be a novel, but one that
adheres perfectly to the author’s life, from the inclusion of her actual circle of
friends, to personal emails, etc. Other examples are just as significant. Reviewing
Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk (2014McDonald, H. 2014. H Is for Hawk. New
York: Grove Press. [Google Scholar]) for The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz praises
the book:

Had there be an award for the best new book that defies every genre, I imagine it
would have won that, too. […] H is for Hawk is an improbable and hybrid creature.
It is one part grief memoir, one part guide to raptors, and one part biography of
T.H. White […]. (Schulz 2015Schulz, K. 2015. “Rapt: Grieving with Your
Goshawk.” The New Yorker, March 9. [Google Scholar])

Ben Lerner, interviewed by The Believer on his book Leaving the Atocha
Station (2011Lerner, B. 2011. Leaving the Atocha Station. New York: Coffee
House Press. [Google Scholar]) (and, as those who read the book would likely
agree, the same applies to his most recent
book 10:04 [Lerner 2014Lerner, B. 2014. 10:04. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux. [Google Scholar]]) seems to further acknowledge such complexity when
discussing the relation between fact and fiction in his work:

Part of what impoverishes discussions about fact and fiction is that they tend to
forget the degree to which what doesn’t [emphasis in the text] happen is also
caught up in our experience. I think you can write autobiographically from
experiences you didn’t have, because the experiences you don’t have are
experienced negatively in the experiences you do. (Lin 2016Lin, T. 2016. “Online
Exclusives: Ben Lerner.” The Believer, April 29. [Google Scholar])

13
Other examples, such as the work of Miranda July, Teju Cole, and, Maggie
Nelson’s autobiographies could easily be added to the list. These works share a
nuanced and critical relation with memoir and with the tension between the
nonfictional writing commanded by autobiography and the fictional universe—
whether in poetic or prosaic form. More formally, as we will see in the next
section, they are characterized by a number of “contra-standard” features, namely
features that run against a more traditional conception of what a genre, and in this
case memoir, is taken to be. Such features, which stem from a reflection on the
fiction/nonfiction divide, but also, and importantly, on other aspects of
autobiography (such as its structural narrative conditions and its relation to the
portrayal of identity) have the ability, which distinguishes contra-features, to alter
the conditions of a genre and to inspire, as I believe to be the case of the examples
listed, the creation of a new literary subgenre. To clarify and further explain the
presence and significance of contra-standard features in the works considered, I
will introduce, at the beginning of the next section, a different approach to the
debate on the nature of fiction and nonfiction, namely, genre theory. It is within
this framework that I will then develop my analysis of the last, or more recent,
movement in the history of memoir.

Genre theory

In this section, I will concentrate on genre theory as presented by Stacie Friend

(2012Friend, S. 2012. “Fiction as Genre.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 112 (2): 179–209. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9264.2012.00331.x. [Google
Scholar], 179–209) and on the concept, within her theory, of contra-standard
features.

14
Developed largely in opposition to the classificatory accounts mentioned in the
previous section, Friend’s theory aims at providing a response not only to the
criteria determining membership in either fiction or nonfiction, but also at
exploring the effects that such a classification has on the readers, and, more
broadly, on the complex web of publishing houses, literary criticism, scholarly
articles, etc. that surrounds each work.

To accomplish her task, Friend’s account dispenses of the rigid conditions that
Gricean and, generally, intentionalist accounts endorse and rephrases the question
of fiction and nonfiction in light of the more fluid distinctions that characterize
different genres. In this sense, fiction and nonfiction are seen as broader categories
within which we can identify and observe the multiple ramifications that follow
when considering the number, and variety, of literary genres.

It is hard not to see the advantages of this approach. The way genres change
overtime, morphing and evolving in their form, structure, and style, but also the
shifts in the way in which audiences understand and enjoy each genre are both
good reasons to choose genre theory over classificatory strategies. For genre
theory, unlike its opponent, relies on a broader and more malleable contextualist
view where features such as writing style, the social and historical milieu of a
work, its publishing history, what kind of readers it targeted, etc. are all taken into
consideration when examining both a work’s belonging to a given genre and its
appreciation and appraisal. Additionally, such features are not to be taken as
essential or necessary conditions: the presence, or absence, of one of more features
is not likely to strongly affect the inclusion of a given work into a genre, thus
providing even more flexibility of classification.

15
Now if we briefly recall what said, at the beginning of this essay, about the
prismatic history of memoir, genre theory, so construed, strikes as a more than
reasonable approach.

First of all, to frame the discussion within genre theory allows us to expand the
boundaries of our analysis to a wider range of theories—philosophical and
literary—on the nature of autobiographical writing. For it is undeniable that
autobiography, despite its most immediate belonging to the “super-genre” of
nonfiction, has long been flirting with fictional narratives, a fact that has captured
the interest of writers and scholars, from Serge Doubrovsky’s introduction of the
notion of autofiction—which sees autobiography and fiction as intertwined and
contributing to each other—to Paul de Man’s altogether independent conclusions
in his pivotal essay “Autobiography as De-Facement” (de Man 1979De
Man, P. 1979. “Autobiography as Defacement.” Mln 94 (5): 919–930.
Comparative Literature. doi:10.2307/2906560. [Google Scholar]).

The richly woven texture of works and scholarly contributions is also crucial in the
identification and establishment, supported by advocates of genre theory, of
memoir’s standard, contra-standard, and variable features. Such distinctions,
originally outlined by Kendall Walton (1970Walton, K. 1970. “Categories of
Art.” Philosophical Review 79: 334. doi:10.2307/2183933. [Google Scholar]),
have been further developed by Friend:

…standard if the possession of that feature places or tends to place the work in a
particular category: flatness is standard for painting; an obvious-but-innocent
suspect is standard for whodunits. A feature is contra-standard if possession of
that feature excludes or tends to exclude the work from a category. Heavy
drumbeats are contra-standard for minuets; stream of consciousness narration is

16
contra-standard for science textbooks. Variablefeatures are those that can differ
between works in a category without bearing on classification. Color and
composition are variable for painting; the degree of detail in describing characters
is variable for the novel. (Friend 2012Friend, S. 2012. “Fiction as
Genre.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2): 179–209.
doi:10.1111/j.1467-9264.2012.00331.x. [Google Scholar])

While standard features are what we normally expect from a genre, contra-standard
features are both unusual and challenging. And yet, contra-standard features are
also the propelling force leading to what may become permanent changes within a
genre. Contra-standard features, can act, to muse, as the avant-garde: their initial
impact is perceived as different, even odd, but they may, with time, be absorbed
into a genre, thus altering what were previously taken to be the standard features of
a genre. This is not, one must add, the only way in which the standard features of a
genre can change, but it is nonetheless a plausible hypothesis88. Truman Capote’s
invention of the “nonfiction novel” is a frequently used example of how contra-
standard features can change a genre and even lead to the emergence of a new
genre. A more recent example could be the use, championed by David Foster
Wallace, of copious footnotes in fictional essays and novels.View all notes and one
that, I believe, is largely confirmed by recent movements and shifts in memoir.

Considerations on genre theory’s potential in monitoring changes within a genre

and what said with respect to contra-standard features offer us a promising strategy
for the analysis of recent movements in memoir. For such movements—and
changes—are likely to result from the emergence of contra-standard features and
from their resulting incorporation into a genre. Memoir is changing, to put it
differently, because some of its standard features are being questioned. But what
are the standard features that are undergoing such a transformation?
17
This is not, alas, an easy question to answer, and yet, the history of memoir does
point us to a number of features that, albeit speculatively, do seem to characterize
this genre—features that may not count as necessary conditions for the inclusion
into a genre, but that are nonetheless typically invoked when discussing memoir by
critics and writers alike.

It is helpful, to then respond to the question above, to look back at what discussed
in relation to Augustine and to reflect on memoir’s origin. What characterizes the
origin of memoir, what urged its emergence, is the desire to confess, to present a
truthful picture of the memoirist. More than the simple recounting of the events of
a life, the beginning of memoir coincides with the idea that we can communicate
something more: our inner consciousness. Confession, for Augustine, was seen as
way to disclose identity, a feature that Georg Misch (1951Misch, G. 1951. A
History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vols I-II. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. [Google Scholar]), in what is still one of the fundamental sources in
autobiographical studies, made central to his analysis. Linking memoir to Wilhelm
Dilthey’s philosophical account on the nature of history, Misch endorses the claim
according to which in autobiography “the subject inquiring is also the object
inquired into” (8), thus framing memoir as the combination of life experiences and
self-revelation.

But if confession and the idea of portraying who we really are is central to
autobiography, so is the fact that such a confession must have a receiver. As I have
briefly mentioned at the beginning of the previous section, autobiographies are
based on a pact that establishes a tightly knit I/You relation between the author and
the audience. This relation has enormous influence on how autobiographies are
written and perceived and it is at the basis of memoir’s undeniable power to draw
emotions and entice both empathic and sympathetic responses. For memoir, as its
18
commercial success also suggests, is a highly “democratic” genre. The stories told
in memoirs are not only—at least we assume—real; they are, for the most part,
relatable. In fact, not only are they relatable, they are often our stories, accounts of
experiences we may have had. But what we might also arguably share with the
memoirist is the idea that a successful grasp and assessment of life may depend on
our ability to weave its most relevant moments together in a narrative form. And
this is, in fact, one of the distinguishing traits of this genre, or, at least, one that is
commonly defended. The idea, in a nutshell, is that memoirs qualify as narratives
and that it is the very ability to structure life according to meaningful narrative
connections—as opposed to a haphazard juxtaposition of events—that encourages
the belief that we may be, cognitively, narrative beings or, as it is often argued,
“narrative selves.” We have, it follows, two separate, and yet intertwined concepts.
The first is the notion of narrative and of what constitutes an autobiographical
narrative. The second is the notion of the “narrative self.” It is not my goal to fully
do justice to both notions, but a few considerations—and clarifications—can
nonetheless be made.

In reference to narrative it will suffice to see memoirs as adhering, broadly, to the

structural analysis of narrative presented by Noël Carroll (2007Carroll, N. 2007.
“Narrative Closure.” Philosophical Studies 135 (1, August): 1–15.
doi:10.1007/s11098-007-9097-9. [Google Scholar]), a structure based on the
importance of causal connections and on the achievement of closure, or of a “sense
of an ending.” The memoirist wishes, if we follow this intuition, to find coherent
and cohesive connections linking the events of a life, connections that could further
deliver the idea that something has been learned, that a portion of life has reached
its conclusion, and it is, in this sense, significant in its own.

19
The presence of a narrative structure—even one as skeletal as the one presented
above—is also a required component for the notion of narrative self. Broadly, the
idea behind the notion of a narrative self is that the delineation of identity depends
upon our ability to see our lives as unfolding stories. Support to this view has
come, to different degrees, from both scientists99. For instance, the ability to weave
life narratives has been seen as an evolutionary advantageous tool by psychologists
such as Dan Hutto who has further shown how such a skill can foster the
development of reason and social skills.View all notes and philosophers among
which, prominently, is Marya Schechtman’s “narrative self-constitution view”
where the construction of a diachronic narrative is at the basis of our ability to self-
evaluate ourselves according to what she summarizes as being the “four features”
of identity, namely, moral responsibility, self-interested concern, compensation,
and survival.

It is precisely the emphasis given to self-evaluation and moral evaluation that links
the narrativist view with memoir. For memoirs, as seen, are confessions and
confessions can hardly avoid being connected to moral features. Memoirs that deal
with moral development and moral assessment are some of the most popular—
battling drug or alcohol abuse, sentimental and family relationships, mourning, etc.
are among the most common themes explored by memoirists—independently of
their literary caliber. Finding the narrative that underlines our lives is then
equivalent, in these memoirs, to finding moral closure; it is what we need to
ascertain who we have become and to further assess—and often accept—each step,
each chapter of life.

I have thus isolated three, largely intertwined, standard features of memoir. The
first is that memoirs are related to the notion of confession, that such a confession
is supposed to be authentic, and that, most importantly, it is delivered under a
20
“pact:” a tacit agreement which connects the author and the reader more deeply
than in other genres. This connection is also behind memoir’s unique ability to
trigger empathic and sympathetic responses: we feel for the memoirist, but we
also, in virtue of the simple fact of “sharing” a life, feel with and as the memoirist.

The second and third features described above further qualify the confessional
nature of memoir by suggesting that the events of life should be weaved together in
a narrative structure involving relevant causal connections and a sense of closure
that is often coupled with a feeling of emotional resolution. Additionally, it is held
that it is specifically the ability to narrate a life according to such a structure that
allows for a better disclosure of identity, one leading to a deeper understanding of
who we are and of our status as moral agents. Memoirs, in other words, stem from
and depend on, cognitively, the fact that we are, by nature, “narrative selves.” But
is this the whole story?

Contra-standard features: tracing the emergence of the critical autobiography

In the first section of this essay, I introduced some of the questions stemming from
the discussion on the boundary between fiction and nonfiction in memoir. I
considered, in this respect, both classificatory and clarificationist solutions and
argued that, as much as classificatory solutions can be helpful in securing the
nonfictional status of memoir, they nonetheless tend to overlook the importance of
more nuanced features such as stylistic choices, intentional ambiguities, and the
numerous strategies adopted by writers to reflect and challenge the tradition,
features to which genre theory gives instead more ample attention. It is in light of
this latter approach that, in the previous section, I tentatively outlined what may be
taken as some of the leading standard features of memoir, features that qualify the

21
structure of this genre, the intentions and motivations behind its creation and
reception.

In this last section, I will contend that, however solid, the standard features of
memoir described above might be undergoing a certain shift, a shift that is
observable in a consistent number of recent autobiographical works which I have
been referring to as the “last wave” of memoir.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of these works, as seen earlier, is their

ability to flirt with the boundary between fiction and nonfiction and to purposely
make us reflect on its relevance; we have, in this respect, an array of solutions,
from works that by downplaying nonfiction in favor of a more distinctively
fictional vibe, such as Ben Lerner’s novels, to works that combine a more strict
sense of nonfictionality with intricate and eclectic stylistic construal, such as
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015Nelson, M. 2015. The
Argonauts. Minneapolis: Greywolf Press. [Google Scholar]), to, of course, works
that are happy to acknowledge and deflect compartmentalization, as Sheila
Heti’s How Should a Person Be?

And yet, I maintain, our relative decisiveness in confining these works to fiction or
to nonfiction is less urgent than an analysis of the extent to which these works may
be contributing to the shaping of what memoir is and will become—they may be
alerting us that memoir is, in fact, ready for an update.

It is important, in this respect, to point to an important difference between the kind

of criticism and analysis presented in this essay and the numerous other attempts at
questioning, and even challenging, what I have, in the previous section, defined as
the standard features of autobiography. The desire to re-discuss the boundaries of
autobiographies (and, more broadly, of fiction and nonfiction) is not new and it is a
22
central feature of postmodern criticism. Hayden White’s claim according to which
all histories are fictions, Christian Metz’s work on the nature of documentaries,
and Paul de Man’s critical assessment of the autobiographical pact all share a
certain skepticism toward the establishment of a drastic boundary between fiction
and nonfiction while exploring the complexity—psychological and
phenomenological—that their connection implies.

Yet, as mentioned, the angle of my analysis is somewhat different. For while the
emphasis in accounts defending autofiction—despite being quite varied—tend to
focus on the reasons why fiction and nonfiction cannot be separated, mine is less
concerned with the need of combining the two than with a reflection on the
implications of such a need. My focus is not, in other words, or definitely not only,
on the extent to which a life story can (or should) be fictionalized; it is, instead, on
the ability of critical autobiographies to structurally and evaluatively assess
stylistic and conceptual changes in the history and development of autobiography.
The intention, in other words, is not simply to investigate whether autobiographies
utilize fiction or adhere exclusively to nonfiction. It is to identify, within literature,
a philosophical and literary debate on what autobiography is today and on its
ability to reflect on its past: from the importance given to the reliability of the
autobiographical pact that characterizes its origin, to the postmodern blurring of
fiction and nonfiction and the ensuing criticism of autobiography that we find in
critics such as de Man.

The discussion launched by “critical autobiographies” is inspired by the complex

history—literary and well as critical—of the autobiography. Not every work,
needless to say, will focus on the same issues, nor do all critical autobiographies
express a similar disillusionment toward the possibility of the autobiographical

23
pact; what they do share, however, is a strong critical awareness of what the past of
autobiography is and an interest in the novel directions that this genre can take.

Specifically, as I suggested earlier, it is possible to provide an overview of the

positions and issues introduced by critical autobiographies by looking at the ways
in which they are jeopardizing the standard features listed in the previous section:
critical autobiographies are challenging the confessional nature of autobiographies,
they are questioning the need for a causal narrative structure that is capable of
achieving emotional closure, and, lastly, they are rethinking the analogy between
the memoirist and the narrative self, introducing alternative ways of conceiving the
bond between identity and life writing.

Confession, and with it the importance, in autobiography, of delivering an

authentic portrayal of the autobiographer, is the first narrative mechanism to have
lost its allure.1010. It is important to specify that an agreement, or a pact, can also
be associated with a work of autofiction; as Lily Tuck, the author of The Double
Life of Liliane, an autofiction, has noticed: “…the author of autofiction tends to be
both the narrator and the central character in his or her story, uses his or her real
name, describes daily life often inventing or modifying certain facts, and does so in
search not only for truth and justice but for the self” Tuck (2015Tuck, L. 2015.
“True Confessions of an Auto-Fictionist. Lily Tuck on the Novelist’s
Documentarist Impulse.” Literary Hub. Accessed 5 March2017. [Google
Scholar]).View all notes

Historically, the confessional need and the consequent confessional bond, or pact,
that is so central to standard autobiographies was first questioned by Paul de Man
through his idea of “autobiography as de-facement,” where de Man used

24
Wordsworth’s Preludeto show both how autobiography escapes rigid definitions
and how it is unable to achieve closure. As he claims:

The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—

it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure
and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual
systems made up of tropological substitutions. (de Man 1979De Man, P. 1979.
“Autobiography as Defacement.” Mln 94 (5): 919–930. Comparative Literature.
doi:10.2307/2906560. [Google Scholar])

The idea that autobiography “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it
restores” (de Man 1979De Man, P. 1979. “Autobiography as Defacement.” Mln 94
(5): 919–930. Comparative Literature. doi:10.2307/2906560. [Google Scholar],
930), certainly affected future generations of autobiographers (leading, perhaps, to
an increased interest in autofiction) and it would not be mistaken to continue to
trace its influence to the new wave of autobiographies that I am considering here.
And yet, there are a few important specifications to be added. The first is that,
while de Man’s account had a strong influence on European literature and on
authors abiding to a postmodern stylistic canon, it barely touched the growing
number of autobiographies, commercial and not, that dominate today’s publishing
industry. In fact, one may speculate that autobiography has seen a resurgence,
especially in the USA, precisely because it promises authenticity (whether it
ultimately delivers it or not). Writing an autobiography has become a testament of
integrity, the willing disclosure of the autobiographer’s intimate identity. Best-
selling autobiographies remain, in this sense, quite attached to the idea of an
autobiographical pact, a pact that is taken seriously by both autobiographers and
readers and that is crucial to how they are received and assessed.

25
But even when we look at the recent movement within autobiography I am
describing in this essay—which calls, almost inevitably, for a more sophisticated
reader—the impact of ideas such as the impossibility of closure is different from
what it had been when first expressed by de Man. The idea, to put it quite simply,
has aged. Skilled writers such as Heti, Nelson, and Lerner are well aware of the
rhetorical power of postmodern literature and criticism, and yet, they have
absorbed and tempered its conclusions. Heti’s How Should a Person Be? A Novel
from Life is, in a way, an illustration and a parody of this attitude. In How Should a
Person Be? the fact that autobiography “deprives and disfigures to the extent that it
restores” is made into a dull fact of life. Heti indulges in factual, detailed, but most
often terribly mundane accounts of her personal life while invoking the status of a
novel. The lack of an actual direction or engaging narrative arch finds its
justification in the boldness of the only narrative question considered: “how should
a person be?” a question that, to no surprise, has no answer. There is not much
more to life than a series of vignettes, of unaccomplished, unending scenarios—
they are real, or at least they feel real, but what in the end is real is their being
experiments: amusing experiments at being a person.

When confronted with Heti’s character (named, of course, Sheila) we cannot avoid
the feeling of being in front of an unfinished, patchy self. It is, additionally,
tremendously hard to feel for her. “Sheila” is unable to find her own, complete self,
but she is also unable (and it is hard not to see this as a conscious stylistic choice)
to share and expose her own emotions, to allow the reader to become invested in
her. The reader is, instead, left at bay.

The characters of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04—two novels
that closely follow Lerner’s personal life1111. It may be possible to regard Lerner’s
novels as autofictions. However, to my knowledge, despite being well versed in
26
literary criticism, Lerner has never referred to his work as autofictions.View all
notes—offer a further, arguably more critical, perspective on the possibility of
confession. To a large extent, one is even tempted to see in them a prototype for
what we may call the “new memoirist,” the memoirist of today, a memoirist that
has internalized the conflicts within this genre and that is condemned—not
unironically—to carry their burden.

Both characters are writers, but they hardly ever write. Mostly, they question their
own writing with a mixture of anxiety, regret, and insecurity; what they question
is, more often than not, how their writing could possibly have affected their lives—
its function in making us who we are and, consequently, in displaying our identity.
Writing makes them live in a galvanized version of the impostor syndrome where
they question both their ability to write—to express something—and the responses
triggered by their work. While almost nostalgically lamenting the revelatory
sentences crafted by “standard” memoirists, the words of Lerner’s characters are
there to hide, complicate, and question.

And, I must add, they complicate beautifully. For the voice and prose chosen by
these new authors is a refreshing mix of genres kept together by an impressive
while inventive control of form. In this respect too, new autobiographies have been
groundbreaking. For not only, as seen, they more liberally traffic in the grey area
where fiction and nonfiction tentatively cooperate, they have also begun to
question narrative conventions.

As much as narrative has not been completely abolished, it is most definitely

looser, often refraining from explicit causal connections and from the need to find
emotional and moral closure. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts which chronicles

27
her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge, is a stellar example of memoir’s
departure from standard narrative conventions.

Nelson’s memoir breaks the page in detached paragraphs which alternate rather
brilliant literary and philosophical criticism with tassels of poetry; her life does not
come in a story, it comes in flashes of brilliance, with a style and pulse that has
nothing of the more relatable, intimate, and (polished) quotidian effortless tone that
more traditional memoirists often adopt. It is interesting, in this respect, to see
what Nelson herself has to say about autobiography:

I haven’t really thought this through (in homage to Wang?), but when I think about
my more “personal” writing, I keep seeing that old Atari game, Breakout. I see the
game’s plain, flat cursor sliding around on the bottom of the screen, popping the
little black dot back onto the thick bank of rainbow above. Each time the dot hits
the bank, it eats away a chunk of color, until eventually it has eaten away enough
of the bank to “break out.” The breakout is a thrill because of all the triangulation,
all the monotony, all the effort, all the obstruction, all the shapes and sounds that
were its predecessor. I need those colored bricks to chip away at, because the
eating into them makes form. And then I need the occasional jailbreak, my
hypomanic dot riding the sky [my emphasis]. (Nelson 2015Nelson, M. 2015. The
Argonauts. Minneapolis: Greywolf Press. [Google Scholar], 61)

Nelson compares life writing to a game, an old one; one that is repetitive, but
nonetheless quite absorbing. Also, a game you play alone. But she is not satisfied
with the comparison: while creating a life narrative is a way of “chipping at”
colored bricks, it is also the place where she can let her “hypomanic dot” surge. It
is here that Nelson, the poet, walks in, here that her acute criticism blends with life,
and there, arguably, that her variation on narrative is formed.

28
In MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, the idea of life as a single story that unfolds is
instead broken into three alternating sections—thus multiplying narrative
possibilities. We have a section dedicated to her own life: her coping with the
death of her father while training her hawk, Mabel, a section dedicated to a partial,
and deeply felt, biography of T.H. White, who, in addition to the Arthurian novels
also wrote about training a hawk, and, lastly, passages on the very art of hawking
that somehow manage to mesmerize birders and non-birders alike. While this work
remains closer to traditional autobiographies, it still seems to deny the idea
according to which one, and only one narrative, can be chosen over the others.
None of three portions seems to take precedence: they are episodes of equal
importance, they all retain their energy and pathos. Reading the book everything
feels tremendously connected, crafted with precisions, but there is no explicit
causal chain of events. Or, better, there is no mandated causal chain. If present,
connections are for the reader to be found at the intersection of each strand; they
need to be searched for patiently, and they need, quite directly, to be recognized as
tentative.

But not only are causal connections to be questioned; equally debatable is the
appropriateness of a given style or genre, a point that, we have seen, is observable
in both Nelson and MacDonald’s works. For perhaps, one is brought to conclude,
there is no true form to tell a life: there is no available narrative.

This last assertion, the idea that there might not be, after all, a narrative underlying
our life and our conception of identity runs counter to the notion of the “narrative
self” I have briefly described in the previous section. But in what sense is this
notion being questioned?

29
It is helpful, in this regard to acknowledge that the notion of the narrative self is
not, and I believe correctly, universally accepted. It is worth mentioning, for
example, Peter Lamarque’s (2007Lamarque, P. 2007. “On the Distinction between
Literary Narratives and Real Life Narratives.” In Peter, ed. Narrative and
Understanding Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google
Scholar]) argument against the plausibility of treating our lives as stories akin to
the ones of fictional characters, or more accommodating positions such as the one
held by Peter Goldie (2003Goldie, P. 2003. “One’s Remembered
Past.” Philosophical Papers 32 (3): 301–319.
doi:10.1080/05568640309485129.[Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar],
301–319; 2012) who argues that a narrative attitude toward the events of our lives,
despite helpful, need not correspond to the notion of a narrative self. Yet, the most
direct attack against the notion of the narrative self, and the one I am mainly
interested in here, has been launched by Galen Strawson (2005Strawson, G.,
ed. 2005. The Self?Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. [Google Scholar]).

Strawson defends the idea of what, in a recent article, he named the “unstoried”
life (Strawson 2015Strawson, G. 2015. “The Unstoried Life.” In On Life Writing,
edited by Z.Leader, 284–301. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]).
Not only does he believe that narratives are not necessary for identity, he also
contends that they are unrelated to our ability to hold and express moral values,
and, lastly, that the tendency to see our lives as narratives is not, as the
“narrativists” argue, a widespread cognitive mechanism. His suggestion is to see us
as episodic selves or SESMENTS (Strawson 1999Strawson, G. 1999. “The Self
and the SESMET.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (4): 99–135. [Google
Scholar], 99–135) (subject of experience that is a single mental thing), namely as
subjects that gain, as he claims, “self knowledge in bits and pieces”

30
(Strawson 2015Strawson, G. 2015. “The Unstoried Life.” In On Life Writing,
edited by Z.Leader, 284–301. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]).

I think there is some plausibility to Strawson’s hypothesis and the works I have
been analyzing seem to confirm his intuition. The protagonists of the works
mentioned hardly depend, for their moral make up on a diachronic, tightly knit,
and tidily organized series of events. Events instead count as episodes, significant,
at least frequently, on their own. The new memoirists are, I believe, critically
looking at a tradition that wanted memoir to become the vehicle of identity, the
locus on intimacy, but that has also begun to acknowledge a sense of
disillusionment, a certain lack of faith in the promises given by life-writing. They
are also direct witnesses to the boom that memoir has experienced in the past two
decades and that has put this genre under the spotlight, transforming it into a
literary, but also social aggregator seducing more readers than any other form of
nonfiction.

We are in front of memoirists who are not only among the most interesting rising
voices in contemporary literature, they are also exceptional media and social
analysts: there is much more to their works than the intention of putting
autobiographical memories and experiences at the forefront of their literary
ambitions. Their “confessions” (together with their tacit acknowledgment that
confession may not be possible) are not shocking for what they reveal—or at least
not only—they are shocking because they have created, through their re-
elaboration of topoi within the tradition, both literary and critical, of
autobiography, a new literary playground of new styles and trends.

What they had to do, and what they did and are doing, is to rethink what memoir
had to offer and specifically, I believe, the three “standard features” I have

31
isolated: the idea of an authentic confession, weaved in a coherent narrative that
while purging the author of her at times unspeakable secrets was also delivering an
almost perfect picture of her identity. It is because of this critical stance developed
through the introduction of contra features that we can see in this new wave a new
subgenre, what I would like to call “Critical Autobiography.”

An objection and a specification

In this concluding section, I will consider two objections against my argument for
the development, in the past decade or so, of the “Critical Autobiography” and
further clarify its status as a new subgenre by adding a few brief considerations on
its reception and appraisal.

The first objection, quite simply, is that works akin to the ones described can be
found in the history of autobiography. The presence of such works would then
invalidate the claim according to which the critical autobiography would represent
a new subgenre.

That works exhibiting contra-standard features, and in particular the ones outlined
in the previous section, have already emerged in the past is absolutely true. Paul
Auster, for example, is famous for often shaping the contours of his novels around
his personal life. Yet, this is not a problem if seen within the theoretical boundaries
I have chosen, namely, genre theory. For, on the one hand, as seen, features are not
to be taken as necessary conditions: the presence or absence of one does not
automatically determine whether a work belongs to a genre or another. On the
other hand, isolated examples do not qualify as genres. In order for a genre (or
subgenre) to be regarded as such we need to be able to identify several works
exhibiting the same features, or, to use the expression adopted in this essay, a

32
wave. Furthermore, not only do we need a relevant number of works sharing
similar features, we also need a certain milieu. The recent revamped attention
toward autobiography is largely unprecedented, and so is the interest in the relation
between autobiography and other genres. It follows that despite the presence, in the
history of autobiography, of works with similar contra-standard features, they are
both not enough to qualify as a separate genre and, additionally, they were not—at
the time of their publication—surrounded by the same critical and creative
environment that distinguishes memoir today.

A second objection may however, more radically, question the fact that the works
mentioned in this essay, despite being innovative, may be representative of a
change in literary fictions and not, strictly, in autobiography.

This is an important objection, and one that should be taken seriously. What gives
support to this objection is that some of the works mentioned in this essay, such as
Lerner’s work, as ultimately fictional, thus not sharing the nonfictional intent that
characterizes autobiographies.

To respond to this objection, it is important to recall what was emphasized earlier

in this article, namely that the actual “percentage” of fictional or nonfictional
element is far less important than their critical stance toward recurring themes in
the autobiographical tradition. Specifically, the works mentioned, share a
preoccupation with how contemporary identities may get to express themselves, a
preoccupation that is literary and stylistic—as shown in my discussion of narrative
and narrative techniques—as well as it is sociological and psychological. The
authors mentioned are divided between the tradition of confession and the
postmodern dismantling of authenticity that followed, but they are also embedded

33
in a world that sacrifices coherent narrative arcs for the more careless, however
addictive, fractionation of language into chats, text messages, and emails.

It may seem, to this extent, that critical autobiographies may share a boundary with
autofictions, and yet, there are important differences. To begin with, some of the
works mentioned, such as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, are decidedly
nonfictional, thus consciously—even somewhat polemically—distancing
themselves from fictionalization attempts. But even when fictionalization is indeed
present, as in the case of Lerner’s work, the definition of autofiction is not
perfectly fitting. For autofictions, as Serge Doubrovsky’s had originally remarked,
are not only based on strictly real events, they have the intention of communicating
a certain truth about the emotional and personal identity of the subject
described.1212. An interesting discussion on the emotional nature of autofictions
and on their adherence to the real life of an autobiographer can be found in
Catherine Cusset’s “The Limits of Autofiction” (2012).View all notes

There is, in other words, a stronger adherence what is to be taken as the inner
nature, psychological and ontological, of the author. Now, as much as this can be
disputed, I do not take Lerner’s work to be attempts at a deeper discovery of
Lerner’s identity; in fact, I believe that would be an overstatement.

For one of the features of these works is that their characters (and authors and
protagonists) question the possibility of such an intimate emotional scrutiny.

So while autofiction most definitely counts as a challenge to autobiographical

practices, it is not identical to what I have been describing in this essay. While
critical autobiographers are definitely aware of it, they are also departing from it,
thus introducing new strands to the discussion on autobiography.

34
It is worth, to conclude, to mention one last point, a point related to appraisal and
assessment of these works.

More traditional examples of memoir strongly engage their readers by eliciting

both sympathetic and empathic responses; they fulfill the promise—implied by the
autobiographical pact—of an intimate connection between the memoirist and the
reader. But what about “critical autobiographies”? What kind of connection are we
to establish with the author? Do we feel for them at all? And if we do not, what is
their power?

My response to these questions is simply to admit that, unlike most works in the
autobiographical tradition, critical autobiographies are not, for the most part,
designed for triggering strong sympathetic or empathic responses. In fact, it is not
uncommon to find some of the protagonists somewhat unnerving; their lives, albeit
involving mundane routines we may easily share, do not unweave according to the
emotional patterns that characterize standard autobiographies. Their episodic
nature and the lack of strong causal connections make it hard for the reader to truly
develop a curiosity for their lives and we are hardly motivated to feel for them or
with them. And yet, we remain curious. For engagement, in these works, is based
less on emotional identification (broadly construed) than it is on a cognitive
understanding of the difficulties that can emerge when stretching the boundaries of
a genre: when life-writing is scrutinized not for its power to reveal, but for its
ambiguity, for its lack of clear coordinates to follow.

Critical autobiographies are, allow me to say, somewhat brainy: they assert a life
while analyzing it according to a multiplicity of standards, one of them being an
actual reflection on the literary effectiveness of memoirs. But readers, at least those
who seek this kind of works, are ready to accept the challenge. After all, the works

35
mentioned in this article have been honored with tremendous critical and public
acclaim, a success that, arguably, is due to both their mastery and to their ability to
capture the readers’ needs and imagination, to captivate their attention despite the
overwhelming number of autobiographies that are published each year.

I have often, in this article, referred to the figure of the memoirist and to the
problematic nature of the pact that readers are “signing” with her. In light of what
discussed, we can now also suggest, that, in addition to the innovations brought by
memoirists, we may also be observing a change in the mode in which readers are
approaching autobiographies. Genres are determined by a number of contextual
features, one of them being the way a work is received and appraised: could this
lead to a new autobiographical pact?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The two terms, “autobiography” and “memoir” will be used interchangeably.

2. I am here relying on James Olney’s analysis of the three main historical phases
of memoir.

3. See, for instance, the work of Laura Marcus (2014Marcus, L. 2014. Dreams of
Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. [Google Scholar]). For a literary take on the topic see Hustvedt
(2009Hustvedt, S. 2009. The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves. New
York: Picador. [Google Scholar]). T.

36
4. I will return, in the section dedicated to genre theory, as well as in my
description of the contra-standard features of critical autobiographies, to the dense
debate that followed Lejeune’s theory.

5. Rousseau adopts different appellatives to refer to himself such as “J.J,” “The

Frenchman,” “Rousseau,” and “The Judge.”

6. There is an ongoing debate on whether we perceive ourselves as diachronic or

episodic beings. I will return on it in the concluding section of this article.

7. “Authentic” unlike “true” is not easily confused with an epistemic notion of true
where a true assertion is seen as stemming from a true and justified beliefs. An
authentic statement might not be objectively true, but it can, as in the case of
Saramago’s memoir, be subjectively true and significant.

8. Truman Capote’s invention of the “nonfiction novel” is a frequently used

example of how contra-standard features can change a genre and even lead to the
emergence of a new genre. A more recent example could be the use, championed
by David Foster Wallace, of copious footnotes in fictional essays and novels.

9. For instance, the ability to weave life narratives has been seen as an evolutionary
advantageous tool by psychologists such as Dan Hutto who has further shown how
such a skill can foster the development of reason and social skills.

10. It is important to specify that an agreement, or a pact, can also be associated

with a work of autofiction; as Lily Tuck, the author of The Double Life of Liliane,
an autofiction, has noticed: “…the author of autofiction tends to be both the
narrator and the central character in his or her story, uses his or her real name,
describes daily life often inventing or modifying certain facts, and does so in
search not only for truth and justice but for the self” Tuck (2015Tuck, L. 2015.
37
“True Confessions of an Auto-Fictionist. Lily Tuck on the Novelist’s
Documentarist Impulse.” Literary Hub. Accessed 5 March2017. [Google
Scholar]).

11. It may be possible to regard Lerner’s novels as autofictions. However, to my

knowledge, despite being well versed in literary criticism, Lerner has never
referred to his work as autofictions.

12. An interesting discussion on the emotional nature of autofictions and on their

adherence to the real life of an autobiographer can be found in Catherine Cusset’s
“The Limits of Autofiction” (2012).

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