What Is Autofiction?

Where the term comes from

Serge Doubrovsky, a French writer and academic, coined ’autofiction’ in 1977 for his novel Fils. On the book’s back cover he described it as fiction made of strictly real events and facts, and contrasted it with autobiography, which he presented as a genre reserved for the important people of this world. The word joins ’auto’, meaning self, to ’fiction’, and the book carried the label ’novel’, one of the criteria later critics would associate with the form.

His coinage is often read as a response to the critic Philippe Lejeune’s idea of the ’autobiographical pact’, the reader’s understanding that an autobiography tells the true story of its author. Autofiction deliberately unsettles that pact: the author, narrator and protagonist may share a name, yet the book is presented as a novel. Later critics, such as Karen Ferreira-Meyers, describe autofiction as a reworking of that pact rather than a clean break with it.

How critics define it

There is no single agreed definition. In a 1989 doctoral thesis, Vincent Colonna described autofiction broadly as the fictionalisation of the self and proposed several sub-types, arguing that identifying the writer as a character is the main criterion. Philippe Gasparini’s 2008 study summarised Doubrovsky’s own criteria: the same name for author and hero-narrator, the label ’novel’, and a reworking of linear time.

Others draw narrower lines. The critic Philippe Vilain separates autofiction from the autobiographical novel by requiring a first-person narrator who shares the author’s name. Writing in Vulture in 2018, Christian Lorentzen argued that autofiction tends to foreground the narrator’s life as a writer and shows the making of the book within the book. He described the term as having been in vogue for the previous decade.

Key features

• The author as character — The narrator usually carries the author’s name or is clearly the author, and real people often appear, sometimes under their own names.
• Presented as fiction — The book is published and read as a novel, which gives the author licence to invent, compress or rearrange events.
• Self-consciousness about writing — Many autofictions are about a writer at work and reflect on how a life becomes a text.
• Unstable truth — Readers cannot be sure what is fact and what is invention, and that uncertainty is part of the point.

From France to the world

France has a strong autofiction tradition. Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, is often grouped with it, though she has rejected the label and describes her approach as closer to ethnography, sitting between literature, sociology and history. Emmanuel Carrère moves freely between novel, biography and personal account in books such as Limonov (2011) and Yoga (2020). Christine Angot’s L’Inceste (1999) and Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy (2014) are other French examples often cited.

In the 2010s the term spread widely in English-language criticism, driven by Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle (2009–2011), in which his relatives appear with their names mostly unchanged, and by English-language writers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole and Jenny Offill. Critics also trace earlier roots, from Proust to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997).

Why it matters now

Critics often link the rise of autofiction to a distrust of conventional plot and an interest in how ordinary life, thought and conversation can carry a book. Others argue that it turns the personal into the political, letting writers from marginalised positions tell their own stories without the full exposure of memoir. An essay in The Conversation, for instance, connects it with the #OwnVoices movement.

The form has its sceptics, who see it as narrow or self-absorbed. Either way, the question it raises, what we owe to the truth when we write about real lives, has made it one of the most discussed forms in contemporary fiction. Doubrovsky himself criticised confessional autofiction by women as a distortion of the form, an early sign of how contested the label has been.

Key works

• Fils — Serge Doubrovsky, 1977. The novel for which the word ’autofiction’ was coined.
• I Love Dick — Chris Kraus, 1997. An epistolary, confessional novel often named as a seminal work of the form.
• The Years — Annie Ernaux, 2008. A collective, third-person account of a life and of French society from the post-war years to the 2000s; Ernaux herself rejects the autofiction label.
• My Struggle — Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2009–2011. Six volumes about the author’s own life, with real relatives under mostly real names, which set a new benchmark for the form.
• How Should a Person Be? — Sheila Heti, 2010. A work of constructed reality drawn partly from recorded conversations with the author’s friends, later subtitled ’A Novel from Life’.
• Leaving the Atocha Station — Ben Lerner, 2011. A young American poet in Madrid questions his own authenticity, setting up Lerner’s self-conscious mode.
• Limonov — Emmanuel Carrère, 2011. A biographical novel in which Carrère’s own voice and doubts are part of the story.
• Outline — Rachel Cusk, 2014. First of a trilogy (with Transit and Kudos) in which a writer-narrator mostly records what other people tell her.
• 10:04 — Ben Lerner, 2014. A novelist named Ben in New York reflects on writing the very book being read.
• Motherhood — Sheila Heti, 2018. An autobiographical novel in which the narrator debates whether to have a child.

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