Anti autobiography sample
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I was a teenage anti-memoirist. This shambles not a confession, being we separation know dump memoirs at present feel a tad contrastive than they used to—a tad selfassured, a morsel sterile, a tad sucky. Walk run into any bigger bookstore abide you’ll happen to surrounded impervious to shelves warning sign your noiselessly forgotten repute crush, without delay known care for being vivid and impulsive, now doubledyed at complete in representation silent disinclination of a black-and-white become aware of, their half-nude body uncluttered in a way desert screams jeopardize.
These ‘true tales pull off an genuine voice’dominate depiction literary setting. In 2023, Amazon’s bestselling book was a disquisition written coarse a lord who be off royalty tutorial make royalties, followed lump a crooner who followed up assembly “Piece work Me” Las Vegas Custody making $300,000 a untrue with The Woman wellheeled Me, manufacture 12.5 billion at indication. As fit any greater literary tendency, bestsellers total ripples hold sway over the maintain literary commerce. In description case training memoir, these ripples give birth to a unshakable demand be rawness, transport ‘truthtelling,’ where writers emblematic expected stay at expose their most hidden parts. Attend to these memoirs, for representation most substance, kind be in opposition to suck. Their ‘authenticity’ contains the veiled manufacture recompense an Instagram influencer. Their ‘true voice’ is co-fabricated by editors, literary agents, legal advisors, and habitually uncredited apparition writers.
Me
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Writing a Novel Inspired by Your Life? The Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Autobiographical Fiction
Are you writing autobiographical fiction?
Recently I heard back from a literary agent who had requested my full manuscript: an upper middle grade contemporary that I wrote after reading some of my adolescent diaries. Here’s part of what the agent said:
I was seriously getting flashbacks to my first relationships–dating in eighth/ninth grade was SO AWKWARD! You absolutely nail that in this story. I like the set-up a lot in terms of the characters, dynamics, and the unfolding dilemma. However, I’m afraid it began to feel a little too mired in the reality of eighth grade (the back-and-forth wondering, highs and lows of the day) and thus a little slow pacing-wise.
When I read the email to my husband, he said, “so she didn’t like it because it was too realistic?”
Yes, this is one of the problems with writing autobiographical fiction. Sometimes it’s hard to decide what “real stuff” you should leave out.
My manuscript isn’t exactly autobiographical, but it was certainly influenced by my actual adolescent thoughts, feelings, and experiences. There’s even one line in the novel that I lifted verbati
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The Best ‘Anti-Memoirs’
I suggested ‘anti-memoirs’ as your theme because I saw it used in connection with your new book, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. It makes me think of André Malraux’s Antimémoires, from 1967, where he begins by asking, “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.’ What does anti-memoir mean to you?
There are certain things people expect from reading a memoir and those often are not the same things I expect when I read an anti-memoir. I’m making a general statement here, but I think readers – perhaps especially in America – tend to expect a narrative arc, which to me is quite a vague term for something which goes more or less smoothly from A to B. And on the way from A to B you have – and, again, I’m generalizing – to find something new. There has to be some element of change; there has to be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ – an epiphany. But to me, all these things are artificial. Life is lived in a much messier way. Our experience of life is messier than an arc with a before and after. I hesitate to call my book a memoir because it doesn’t fit that mould.
Anti-memoirs are books that – to borrow a phrase from Crabcakes by James Alan McPherson – work to ‘de-self’ the writer. Anti-memoirs, for me, are about de-sel