Motherhood by Sheila Heti: book review and autofiction thoughts
Motherhood by Sheila Heti I'm starting to realize there's two different things that end up being called "autofiction." There are classically shaped novels with fully drawn worlds and character arcs, where, after arriving at the end of the book and reading the author bio, you realize there might have been more truth in the fiction than originally appeared. This often happens, primarily, to young women who must, of course, be the young women they write about. But then there's an entirely different phenomenon, I'm coming to see, where autofiction is a stylistic framework, an entirely alien approach to what novel writing can be. The experience of stumbling into this has unsurprisingly come through two of the modern version of the movement's most celebrated figures—Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner. And this version of autofiction, while sharing the fact that it's shelved in the fiction section of the bookstore and have protagonists that resemble the authors, do...
