In Defense of Fakeness
Arguably, no mode of writing has influenced the past decade of novels more than autofiction, a catchall term for books that call themselves fiction while claiming to be rooted, in some way, in their authors’ real lives. Amid this boom, critics and readers alike have shown a certain anxiety over how based in fact a novel can be—and how anyone might know, given that no autofiction writer purports to be telling the complete, unadulterated truth.