Our Autofiction Fixation
March 14, 2021
In February 2020, at a book party in a Brooklyn brownstone, a smiling stranger walked up to me. “We have something in common, you know,” she said. “We conceived our children without having sex.” My memory of the exchange then goes blank for a moment I must have spluttered some confused pleasantry in response but it quickly emerged that she had read my first novel, which explores its protagonist’s struggles with infertility, and drawn the conclusion that I myself had undergone I.V.F., as she had.
It was an audacious introduction. But I could not begrudge the assumption she had made, even if I was disoriented by the way she had expressed it. I, too, assume that much of the contemporary fiction I read is autobiographical. Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain,” which won the Booker Prize, drew openly on the author’s childhood. Ayad Akhtar wrote “Homeland Elegies” in the form of a memoir, and Brandon Taylor, a former doctoral
New in Paperback: âBlowoutâ and âThe Last Trialâ
By Jennifer Krauss
AT THE CENTER OF ALL BEAUTY: Solitude and the Creative Life,
by Fenton Johnson. (Norton, 272 pp., $15.95.) An author of novels, essays and memoirs who grew up next door to Trappist monks, Johnson argues that solitude, the opposite of loneliness, is essential not only to creativity (as evidenced by the outputs of 11 historic arts figures), but also to living fully, and usefully, in the world.
RUN ME TO EARTH,
by Paul Yoon. (Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $17.) âBeauty and violence coexistâ in a universe âby turns cruel and wondrous,â our reviewer, Tash Aw, wrote of this ârichly layeredâ novel that follows three Laotian children whom we meet in a field hospital during American bombing raids. What they donât yet realize is âhow the pain of their wartime years will spread its tentacles ⦠across continents and over decades.â