The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity

Description

Writing autobiography is a complicated, often fraught activity for both writer and reader. We can find many recent examples of the way such writing calls into question the author's truthfulness or their authority to present as definitive their 'version' of a particular event or portion of their lives. Drawing upon a wide range of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century autobiographical writing, The Fiction of Autobiography examines key aspects of autobiography from the interrelated perspectives of author, reader, critic and scholar, to reconsider how we view this form of writing, and its relationship to the way we understand and construct identity. Maftei considers recent cases and texts such as Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Frey's A Million Little Pieces alongside older texts such as Proust's In Search of Lost Time Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In part, this is to emphasise that key issues reappear and arise over decades and centuries, and that texts distanced by time can speak to each other thoughtfully and poignantly.

Micaela Maftei holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow's English Literature Department. She is based in Toronto, Canada, where she works as a freelance editor. She is co-editor, with Laura Tansley, of Determining Form: Creative Non-Fiction Journeys (2013).

An enlightening and superbly readable survey of the autobiography genre and its claims to truth and honesty. I'll be recommending it to my writing students, and to everyone else I know who's interested in good writing and how it works. -- Sarah Bakewell, Visiting Lecturer at City University, London, UK, and author of How to Live, or A life of Montaigne (2011), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography In literature, questions can be general but the answers which are useful and illuminating are always particular. The Fiction of Autobiography engages familiar and unfamiliar twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, English and translated, with a keen particularism: how do they make and remake the past? Maftei's own attempts to write 'from the life', included here in a memorable appendix from which the reader may choose to start, provoked the questions, and this engaging essay takes place in a practitioner's intellectual and emotional back room, where she considers the various paradoxical aspects of the things she and others try to revive or re-invent from memory. The book is a wonderful dialogue with her own work, her reading, her readers. It leaves us with enabling questions and insights. -- Michael Schmidt, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Glasgow and Writer in Residence at St John's College, University of Cambridge, UK