Fiction as Autobiography

Earlier this year, the New York Times Sunday Book Review ran a piece by Jami Attenberg entitled "It's My Fiction, Not My Life." I clipped it out when it ran and then lost it in a pile of papers.

Authors, Attenberg noted, are very frequently asked by readers how much of a story they have written is autobiographical. Some smile are willing to answer in one fashion or another, no matter how frequently they are asked. But many others are not so accommodating.





Attenberg herself would be delighted if the question would just go away, but since it won't, she struggles with how best to respond. That's what her article in The Times  is all about.

I've written two novellas, "Manhattan Morning" and "Gina/Diane," and, yes, I get asked: To what extent are they autobiographical?

In my case there are two ways: 

First, each little book is set in a certain real-world location that I am very familiar with. Both reference real things that are still located in those settings (such as Grand Central Terminal), or things that were there at the time the story was set, but have since disappeared. There, I'm thinking about a particular retail store that relocated to different street. Not very juicy stuff, but very much in the spirit of, say, Virginia Woolf, with whom I would dearly love to be associated in the minds of readers.

The second way they are autobiographical is at least a little more interesting, but also far from voyeuristic titillation -- if that is what people are after.  Both "Manhattan Morning" and "Gina/Diane" are autobiographical in an intellectual sense. They include or revolve around problems or issues, or just particular topics or ideas, that have occupied or preoccupied me at various times in my life for one reason or another. Because I have thought so much about them, I wanted to write about them and to make it more interesting, to do so by way of fiction.

For instance, as a male, I did not have an abortion (no surprise), but in part because I have known women who did and in part because abortion has long loomed large in American politics and in the prevailing culture wars, I wanted to write a story where an abortion was the central element. Likewise, while I am not a particularly religious person, controversies over religion have swirled around me all my life so that topic figures in both books.

While sex is important in both novellas, there are no graphic descriptions that, gasp, might have come from personal experience. Too bad. I suspect demand for these books would be far larger than is the case at present!