Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante are making a huge success of it, but telling one’s own story in fiction is far from straightforward
It should be so easy. Things happen to you. They seem like stories; no, they seem like story, all put together and ready to go. So you write the things down. You don’t even really have to write them; you stream them, as though on a kind of internal Netflix, the scenes flowing out on to the page. This is autobiographical fiction: in the age of Knausgaard, of Ferrante, of Lerner and Offill and Cusk, in whose novels the autobiographical is not just a presence but a preoccupation, a driver – well, what on earth is keeping you? Get it down and turn the page.
And yet. And yet. “If only one knew what to remember or to pretend to remember,” Elizabeth Hardwick’s narrator announces at the beginning of her novel Sleepless Nights – also, in the autobiographical way, the novel the narrator herself is attempting to write in front of our eyes. “Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps.”
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And yet. And yet. “If only one knew what to remember or to pretend to remember,” Elizabeth Hardwick’s narrator announces at the beginning of her novel Sleepless Nights – also, in the autobiographical way, the novel the narrator herself is attempting to write in front of our eyes. “Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps.”
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