Autofiction and reality

Starting from a previous piece of mine published in L’Idiot Digital, I want to return to the relationship between society and literature—and I want to do it, of course, as an inexperienced reader and note-taker. More specifically, to the relationship between today’s literature and today’s society. Literature isn’t only an object of pleasure; it is also a tool for reading society. While historiography gives us information about events of great impact—so to speak, mass events, often bound up with power—contemporary literature offers us countless representations of the conditions in which individuals currently live.

In the article I’ve already mentioned, drawing on the theses of Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society, Nottetempo, 2010) and Marracash (È finita la pace, 2024), I argue that we now live in a society that, in short, does not dialogue. “We all live inside our own bubbles, in a society divided into classes and stereotypes.” In my view—and this is a fairly widespread and acknowledged opinion—this state of affairs is also due to the incisive force of internet and social-media algorithms, which propose content based on our search histories, allowing us to remain enclosed within what we already want to see, and in practice forcing us to stay inside a prison of self-reference and ignorance.

I think this mechanism should be attributed to the real purpose of the internet and social networks: a commercial purpose, namely to connect producer and consumer until an inseparable bond forms between the two. Because of this inseparable bond, could we say that the virtual world of the internet and social media now constitutes our new—and true—society? It’s no coincidence that these platforms were dubbed “social.” And yet, even if this is our true society, it cannot be called our real society, because it is only virtual. In that case, the cardinal principles of reality and truth would come apart. If, up to now, we have taken the unity of reality and truth for granted, is that unity now being called into question?

The problem is that if it’s true we inhabit both worlds—the virtual and the real—then we are suffering the consequences of two different worlds. But it is the real world, the only natural one, that contains our actual psychophysical conditions. If we think about it, we can say that for many people today the real world is overshadowed by the virtual one, and this pushes us toward isolation. “Deluded by the internet into believing we’re interconnected, we are in fact isolated. What’s more, we end up living inside what the algorithm offers us, completely ignoring what is happening right outside our door (or even, in some cases, inside our home).” In my opinion, this mechanism is willed by capitalism as it has developed in this historical period—the very system within which the internet and social networks were created, we might say, in its own image and likeness.

This leads me to another question: is it possible that, according to the logic and dictates of this system, the consumer must be tied exclusively to the producer, with the consequence that consumers are unable, in any way, to converse with one another?

And again—and here I’m pushing beyond my already modest analytical abilities—if this were possible, what would happen if consumers went back to confronting one another? Might they then turn against the system?

I would add that an even more significant driver of isolation among individuals is the rise of self-employment as opposed to dependent work—the factory, in other words. With the end of the illusion of the economic boom, and with every trace lost of that thrust—often harmful, too—that animated both entrepreneurs and workers, born of Italy’s industrial development, in these 2000s we are witnessing labour that is ever more fragmented and outsourced to artisans who are entrepreneurs of themselves. This belongs to the theme of self-exploitation that Byung-Chul Han writes about.

Now: could literature be a valid tool for getting out of this situation? Could literature at least show us the conditions in which we live as individuals? The problem is that writers find themselves in the very same situation. “Each of us inhabits an increasingly oppressive comfort zone that makes us intolerant, blind, and invisible. Writers and intellectuals of every kind are inside these bubbles: their thought is irrelevant because it doesn’t leave the bubble; it reaches only a loyal audience that is just as intolerant and blind.”

In this article I’ve placed the emphasis on the strong presence of autofiction in the catalogues of the most popular publishing houses, as far as the most recent releases are concerned. By “autofiction” we mean a kind of novel written in the first person by the author, who inserts autobiographical elements into the plot: usually, the narration of events external to the narrating “I” intertwines with the description of a period in the “I”’s own life. Perhaps for this reason autofiction seems to lend itself to journalistic reportage: the reporter describes a stretch of their life during which they followed a story in a given area of the world and in a given historical period.

Various novels by Emmanuel Carrère, and by the 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, display this feature—perhaps among the most fitting and well-known examples of autofiction writers. If we think, instead, of Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi, the narrative inspired by real events (indeed, as the author specifies, the novel’s events and characters differ from the real ones) intertwines with commentary on various literary works; but the way the text unfolds is entirely similar to the cases just mentioned: the autofiction writer joins a private story to an issue of public interest through the devices of the novel.

Now, since a number of literary critics say that this narrative approach has become very frequent—almost a generalized phenomenon—it is worth analysing.

In my view, the strong presence of autofiction in the publishing market does not depend solely on the free choices of writers: we cannot think about it without considering the premises of our society. Otherwise, we would not be discussing a model that repeats itself so often. It is therefore urgent and necessary to consider autofiction as a product of this society, keeping in mind that we are not referring to just any society, but to a capitalist society of consumption. To approach the subject purely with a personal opinion would be rather useless. Instead, we will consider several hypotheses as to why our society’s storytelling is marked so significantly by autofiction. In truth, even attributing the characteristics and premises of a society to a type of novel is already a stance. I believe, in fact, that this way of narrating is due to the isolation in which we all live today, writers included. Why write an imaginary third-person story when our days are built on the chase for usefulness and the promotion of the self? But let’s get more specific.

Paolo di Paolo has also written about the social problematic of autofiction:

“It’s not a brand-new novelty, no; and yet the other day, as I was tidying away several recent and very recent Italian novels, it struck me that there was nothing else. That, leaving aside the hyper-codified genres (fantasy, romance, noir, the family saga against a historical backdrop), the rest of the field was militarily occupied by explicitly autobiographical stories. The major prizes have reflected this tendency for quite some time already, with their shortlists and longlists, but it seems to me—and maybe I’m just talking myself into it—that there has been a further intensification.” (Limina magazine, 6/2/2025)

According to Paolo di Paolo, if we judge by what the Italian book market offers, we can first of all register the poor condition of the third-person novel, the kind with an external narrator, where “those characters-who-are-not-the-author but have a great deal to do with the author” are represented.

At first glance, Paolo di Paolo believes the success of autofiction can, in short, be reduced to the lack of ambiguity in what it puts on the table, and thus to its ease. For readers, on the one hand: “It seems readers today are reassured by a clearer pact: either fiction-fiction, extreme fiction, unmistakable and crystallized in its recognizable codes, or the true story.” For publishers, on the other: “But there’s more: publishing itself, which isn’t an abstract entity but is certainly made of waves and fields of force, seems increasingly inclined to demand—from debut authors as much as from those writers who once wrote ‘ambiguous’ novels—that they radically put themselves on the line, that they tell themselves—how do we say it?—without filters.”

This is because, for Paolo di Paolo, the novel must in some way adapt to the times, and in particular to the virtual world of social networks: “Dear writers, dear women writers, you’ll have to play at being the Ferragnez a little.”

The subjection of our lives to social media is certainly a theme to be taken seriously. To translate it into writers’ practices, we need here to mention something about Substack’s self-referentiality. Is it a platform? Is it a social network? What difference does it make? Look closely, and Substack today seems more necessary than ever for a writer who cannot live off their literary work (see—without polemic or envy—Cazzullo, Saviano, Carofiglio, etc.) and who cannot live off private means. Work in general is increasingly autonomous: while the middle-class writer has to go freelance, Substack allows them to build a loyal audience and earn through subscriptions. Of course, attracting readers is not automatic, and without a pre-existing, real pool of “followers”—that is, external to social media—this tool can prove irrelevant and without influence.

It goes without saying that the mere mechanism by which an author publishes all their thoughts on a personal, paid page—complete with advertising brands and customized graphics—is self-referential and dispiriting. And yet a writer has to eat. The poverty of writers has been widely discussed recently because of the Jonathan Bazzi case. The author of Febbre (Fandango, 2019)—an autobiographical novel, finalist for the Premio Strega 2020, and a regular presence in the culture inserts of Italy’s major newspapers—posted on social media a screenshot of his bank statement for October: the numbers that emerged—35 euros in income, 997 in expenses—predictably caused a stir, prompting debate about the economic conditions of writers.

But, returning to us: how can a writer go on if they can neither live off private means nor off their publishing successes?

Is the only solution for the writer to become an entrepreneur of themselves? A platform like Substack then becomes a necessary tool for disseminating one’s work. And what else do we expect a writer to write on their personal page? It’s not strange that, in this context, a writer adopts a more conversational attitude through a more private form of narration (and here Paolo di Paolo’s thesis about the influence of social media is partly right—though not in its reasoning, because in some cases the writer does not want to become an influencer; that is a consequence produced by platform mechanics, and before that, by society itself). If only because, in speaking confidentially, the writer places themselves on the same level as the reader/subscriber.

In this sense, the route proposed by Paolo di Paolo certainly has convincing motivations. Han Kang’s autofictions—such as Non dico addio (Adelphi, 2021)—seem easier to read than Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. And it’s certain that a good entrepreneur meets the demands of potential customers.

“When did we begin asking writers to stop inventing characters needlessly close to themselves in order to put on the autarchic jersey of characters made out of themselves—bewildered, wounded, furious, shameless ‘I’s’ to be listened to as if at the grille of a confessional?” We cannot believe, however, as Paolo di Paolo does, that the abundance of autofiction is due exclusively to market demand and the choices imposed by publishers. Before they are sold, these novels are written. And to write a good novel, I think, requires fairly strong feelings—so I would attribute it more to a need than to a calculated choice.

In my view, writing autofiction is therefore more likely due to a historical necessity: the isolation in which we live does not allow us to widen our gaze and look beyond ourselves. Or perhaps the writer feels the need to redefine their identity. Let’s remember that Italo Svevo wrote Zeno’s Conscience (1923)—which has nothing to do with autofiction—in the first person, managing to represent precisely the crisis of individual identity in Modernity. Without forgetting, however, that the protagonist writes his memoirs probably because of a neurosis, an existential crisis. Are we all prey to a collective neurosis? Without going that far, we can say that the appeal to a social diagnosis repeats itself.

It should also be said that today writing about facts that are not strictly personal may be a luxury not everyone can afford. If Tolstoy had lived in the 2000s, would he have had the time to write Anna Karenina (1878)? In a society that has no time—no coincidence that Byung-Chul Han calls it the “performance society”—an author tries to deliver to the public a work that feels maximally urgent. These days, attention has also sharply declined: for writer and reader alike. Rare, then, is the capacity to linger for a long time on something, like a long family novel overflowing with descriptions.

This last aspect, tied above all to writers’ social status, should not be neglected. Compared to past eras, our present has a kind of communication that admits very few mediations. We might say there is no longer a need to lay out elaborate plots and narrative entanglements as a pretext for expressing thoughts and feelings. Immediacy is demanded.

But even where detailed description of information related to the novel’s plot is merely a pretext for addressing a broader discourse on a social or psychological context, the logic of omitting parts of narration deemed useless for the author’s “political” or “moral” intent impoverishes our cognitive and aesthetic landscape. Here we touch the dilemma of literature as an end or as a means: one does not exclude the other, and perhaps it would be more accurate not to insist on separating them. In some way, literature—and I think everything we do in life—is always a pretext. All the more so because even a dry, raw, urgent, imminent, realist narration is a stylistic and artistic choice.

Yet despite these traits of his storytelling, Vasily Grossman—who in my view is a Homer of the twentieth century—did not write autofiction and went beyond himself, tracing plots and depicting characters in some respects far from him. Unlike Emmanuel Carrère, who in a certain sense (certainly not literary or stylistic) is his heir. Carrère is probably the most well-known and influential autofiction writer: with his approach he interweaves the narrator’s personal story with the facts being narrated. The reporter goes beyond reportage by adding personal elements to the account. This is a very liberal way of imposing oneself: the narrator almost calls into question the reliability of their own narration, as if to say the story may be affected by the condition of the one who tells it. What is narrated must, in some way, restore centrality to the individual, including the narrator.

This already conflicts with a totalitarian political setup such as the Soviet one, which excludes individuality. It is interesting to note how, after Carrère, this aspect also travels beyond the novel. It reappears, for example, in the biographical work on Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, The Man Without a Face (Sellerio, 2022) by Masha Gessen, herself a journalist from the USSR. Though it contains no fictional elements (and is therefore not a novel), limiting itself to a purely documentary intent, Gessen’s work includes autobiographical passages, such as her personal situation during the research. A certain ambiguity thus emerges.

If we compare a work by Carrère with one by Gessen, we can distinguish them by calling the first a work of fiction—since it contains, even if only in part, elements of the novel—and the second a work of non-fiction; but where Carrère’s work, though remaining a novel, includes elements of non-fiction, Gessen’s, though remaining documentary, includes autobiographical elements. In other words, although they belong to two different categories—autofiction (Carrère) and non-fiction (Gessen)—the two narrations share apparently similar features. Put more simply, a distracted reader might confuse the fictional text with the work of reportage.

This can lead to mixing the categories, as in the Italian case of Gomorrah (2006): in Roberto Saviano’s foundational work, journalistic chronicle, autobiography, and the novel are all present together, well blended. At this point the obvious question arises: what is fiction and what isn’t? But, on closer inspection, neither Saviano nor Gessen nor Carrère created the problem. The problem lies in narration itself. A narration—even a journalist’s—will never be completely objective; it will always depend on the narrator. That does not mean that, because it is subjective, it must necessarily be false.

Autofiction has allowed us to take this problem seriously: the relativity of storytelling. Which is not new: historians have always verified and compared sources. As always, then, the novel puts before our eyes the complexity of existence: nothing is absolutely certain, guaranteed, given in advance. Ours is a complex existence.

In passing, it should also be said that Saviano’s writing has features that are very interesting for our discussion. Vasily Grossman is openly a model for him, stylistically as well; at the same time, he greatly admires Emmanuel Carrère, who in turn was influenced by Grossman. Saviano also wrote the preface to Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face for Sellerio’s 2022 edition. In short, he is an author worth deepening—worthy of esteem for his account of Italy and, perhaps even more, for his way of narrating, positioning himself as a bridge between today’s literature and that of less recent authors, Italian and “foreign” (it’s tempting to think that writers always are, a little, even at home) like Grossman.

Closing this discussion of autofiction, then, let no one take from it the message that writers who use it are in some way authors not to be considered, or second-rate authors (who would I be to say that, anyway!). It is a fact that today’s literature is marked by autofiction; therefore it is part of what allows literature to be taken seriously, to be read. Rather, we can reflect on why today a writer feels it necessary to place their life explicitly inside the story, and also why a reader prefers a close, “speaking” narrator rather than a “narrating” narrator—external, detached.

One reason might be the reader’s need for comfort. Moreover, as we’ve said, we live in an era without mediations: the writer has lost—or has chosen to lose (“If I have gained any authority, poorly, through that work of mine, I am here to put it entirely into question: as indeed I have always tried to do,” Pasolini writes, moreover, in the first issue of the column Il caos for the weekly Tempo, which he ran from 1968 to 1970)—their authority, bringing down the barriers between reader and narrator.

We can make observations about the state of imagination in the novel: autofiction seems particularly linked to a sought-after realism, indeed to the very attempt to bring back reality, since it would be the author themselves testifying to it in the first person. At this point we should also say that what is being lost sight of in the novel—the trait that defines it as such—is fiction. Perhaps the novel, carried to its extreme consequences—through an individuality that narrates itself—is self-destructing. These are all considerations we can make in light of a reflection on our society that goes beyond the novel.

For this reason, returning to my starting point, I repeat my opinion: the rise of autofiction in today’s book market is attributable to social and economic causes (with particular attention to self-employment), and thus (and not primarily) to psychological causes, on the part of authors and readers. It should be said that, although the approach expressed in autofiction is increasingly present and is probably, so to speak, becoming standardized, its use now looks excessive to many.

Probably also because in a Western society where the ego is increasingly put on display, a narrative of the self seems to add almost nothing to what we already have before our eyes every minute. And then, if I’m to say what I think, I find it far more satisfying to discover ourselves in events and contexts—in the passions and vices of characters who are only apparently very far from us—rather than in our own most insistent, hidden, or everyday problems.