Autofiction as a Doorway Into Truth
Sean Glatch | August 11, 2025 |
Some of my favorite novels are not-so-secretly autobiographical. I’m thinking of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. None of these novels tell their authors’ stories with complete dedication to factual reality, but each of them are based on true, lived experiences, and they reveal both portraits of the authors themselves and different ways of thinking through the world.
The impulse to turn one’s story into fiction might seem paradoxical. On the surface, fiction is, well, fiction, and the budding memoirist might not like to tell stories that didn’t happen. On a deeper level, autobiographical fiction (sometimes called autofiction) feels alienating: the self becomes reproduced and packaged into something salable and salient; identity is alchemized into capital, which the writer draws upon to sell themselves in a marketplace of ideas.
And yet, curious nonfiction writers might actually find themselves liberated by writing themselves into fiction. In altering one’s life story, autofiction might actually help the writer access Capital-T Truth.
Creative writing is, after all, art, and artists have artistic license—permission, in other words, to deviate from the facts of things if it serves a deeper thematic or aesthetic purpose. We know that E.T. didn’t phone home, but we still resonate with his loneliness on Earth; we know that there aren’t any clocks melting in a desert, but still we feel the pain and absurdism in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory.
That’s not to say that writers and artists should disguise a lie as truth. That’s for politicians. But it does mean that writers can deviate from facts in order to access Truth.
Writers can deviate from facts in order to access Truth.
Take Batuman’s The Idiot. I can’t tell you whether any aspect of the novel was invented, embellished, or erased—only Batuman knows this, and even so, facts can be distorted by memory. I do know that the facts of the novel largely mirror Batuman’s life: Selin, the novel’s protagonist, begins her Freshman year studying linguistics at Harvard, develops an off-and-on situationship with a student named Ivan, and reckons with the weirdness of adulthood that only a young adult can notice. Why would Batuman write this as a novel, not a memoir?
While the facts of both the real and fictional story are likely the same, the autofiction genre gave Batuman the distance needed to tell the story well. The Idiot is not a novel of plot, it’s a novel of language and voice. Selin is a wonderfully entertaining narrator. Her dry wit and surprising observations imbue the work with a sense of both alienation and intimacy: the reader understands Selin both very well and not at all. As a narrator, Selin also plays with language often, noticing when words fail, when language is not able to say what it intends to. It’s the literary equivalent of Seinfeld, perhaps with less nihilism: an observational novel “about nothing,” yet I recognize the life refracted inside it.
Moreover, Batuman wrote The Idiot long after the events of the novel occurred in her own life. I think the novel form freed her from trying to cling too closely to the facts. The plot details are the same, but by making Selin her literary alter ego, Batuman could access the thoughts she had as a college student, as well as give Selin the perspective and maturity—the word choice—she had accrued in the ~20 years since.
Here’s my point for you: the nonfiction writer is, above all, a writer concerned with the Truth of their own lives and perspectives. Nonfiction is a great vessel for this Truth-seeking endeavor, but fiction is also a means of accessing something deeper about real life. When you find yourself struggling to tell the Truth about something, consider retelling it as fiction, giving yourself the artistic license to explore what the facts might be hiding.
Autofiction Prompts
Here are some ideas for your nonfiction practice—consider these as prompts for autofictional essays:
- Write a story where you’re the protagonist, but the names of you and everyone in the story are changed. Then, follow what your imagination tells you to write.
- Write a story about yourself from the perspective of someone you know. Do not access your own interiority: you are writing about yourself from someone else’s interior. You can interview that person, or simply write what you think their perspective is. What about your story might be revealed from this other lens?
- Think of a significant conflict you once had with someone important to you. Write a story where the characters are switched. For example, if the other person caused the conflict, write a short story where you caused the conflict.
- Write a story whose beginnings and endings are the same as they occurred in your own life, but the events that happen in the middle are entirely different from the ones that happened in real life.
- What is something in your history that you regret not doing? Write a story in which you do the thing you didn’t do. Explore the alternate history in which your life has been changed by this event. (You can also do the opposite: a story in which you didn’t do something you did in real life.)
The point is not to publish stories where you lie to the reader. Rather, it’s to see what new Truths are discovered in the realm of fiction. And, so long as the reader knows that this is fiction or autofiction, you’re not lying, you’re making art—inspired by your own life.
For more on the art of lying-into-Truth, you might be interested in the following:
Lynn Steger Strong on the Importance of Imaginative Truth in Fiction and Nonfiction
Read this craft essay here, in LitHub.
Admittedly, Steger Strong’s craft essay opens with an unnecessarily shocking image, but that’s the point of the image, and also this newsletter—the Truth doesn’t need to be factual to be honest.
I love what this article empowers you to do: lean into what your imagination tells you, and treat it as a doorway into discovery. This moment feels particularly true to me:
Of course, it’s story that does it—and the best biographers know this. Neither the art nor the facts tell us who the person was, exactly—I’m not sure that’s possible—but the art gives us clearer, more thrilling access to the truths—the feelings and the ideas that churned most constantly inside them, the things that kept them up at night.
Narrative is a means of generating Truth that facts alone don’t convey. Of course, narrative also has the danger of making arguments seem like facts, which good liars know when they try to peddle falsehoods. But then, savvy readers can read between the lines and discern when narratives are honest, and when narratives tell stories with selfish intent.
The point is that your imagination makes ideas legible, whether you write fiction, autofiction, lyric essays, or straightforward nonfiction. No nonfiction writer provides all the facts and details: they amplify what is most important to make meaning out of life. Your imagination is what makes this meaning-making possible.
