Paper Dolls: Autofiction, ambivalence and resistance

Resistance and ambivalence are pivotal in the construction of autofictional texts. While critics highlight the ambiguous status of autofiction, the genre is commonly understood to deliberately destabilise reader expectations regarding truth and ‘literary selfhood’. Writers in the genre experience ambivalence toward both the status of literary protagonists, and the truth claims of memoir. They seek instead to engage readers ‘not only in the consumption of plot content (of which there is often very little) but also in the transmission of representations of life experience’ across the boundaries of ‘fiction and nonfiction’ (Jensen in Dix 2018: 72). While writers resist the either/or truth claims of fiction/nonfiction, readers experience the ‘ambivalent status’ of the genre as one which ‘allows for moments of fabrication without degrading the significance or impact of the narrative’ while at the same time incorporating ‘a hermeneutics of suspicion into its form’ (Mathews in Dix 2018: 141). Taking my own experience of writing and publishing the novel Why We Are Here (Vintage, 2023) in ‘real time’, this reflective paper considers the unique textual incursions autofiction makes into the narrativisation of personal and collective crisis. I identify resistance and ambivalence as generic ‘friction points’ that might become productive sites for creative and critical interventions in an always multivalent present moment.