Autofictional

Autofictional refers to a narrative mode that blends autobiographical elements with fictional content, producing works in which the author's life and invented events are fused on the page. In autofictional writing, the narrator is often the author, and the boundary between fact and invention is deliberately blurred.

The term autofiction was popularized in literary discourse by Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term in 1977 with his novel Fils. Since then, autofictional writing has described a range of texts that foreground personal experience as a primary material while embracing fictional techniques.

Core characteristics include first-person narration, a focus on memory and identity, self-reflexivity, and the mixing or alteration of real details with invented elements. Authors may present themselves under real or fictional names and restructure events to explore psychological or ethical questions rather than to report events faithfully.

Autofictional works are often distinguished from memoirs, which aim for non-fictional reconstruction, and from traditional novels, which are not bound to the author's life. The autofictional approach can be chosen to protect privacy, to examine the hollowness or malleability of memory, or to interrogate what counts as truth in storytelling.

Notable examples frequently described as autofictional include Annie Ernaux's The Years, Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle, and Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy; each uses the author's experiences as a central engine for fictionalized exploration.

Reception has been mixed, with advocates praising its honesty and risk-taking, while critics scrutinize the ethics of representation and the reliability of the narrator. The term remains debated, but autofictional practice is widely considered a significant development in contemporary literature.