Me, Myself, and I

This summer, towards the end of my twenties, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She had a colonoscopy in June, a procedure she found torturous, and they found a malignant tumor. She told me over the phone that she had said before being sedated how proud she was of herself for doing it at all, and how supportive the medical team had been. When they told her her results, it seemed like bad karma. All that wishful thinking.

I started having phantom stomach pains over the coming weeks, cramps that were so bad I could barely stand up sometimes. I decided it was probably stress. I reread The Undying by Anne Boyer, lying on my bedroom floor, and felt unbearably sad. Death is sad. The prospect of suffering, in some ways, is worse. My best friend’s mother had died of cancer while we were living together a few years before and I felt like I had by osmosis absorbed a filtered version of her grief. I kind of knew what to expect.

There is so much writing about cancer, so many hashtags. It has its own visual lexicon. On television, you know the signs immediately. I hated talking to people about it, their awkwardness, their pity, so mostly I didn’t. There was some precedent for this in my life. When my brother died while I was a child, my grieving parents instructed us to say nothing if we were asked about it. That fierce sense of privacy, a protective shell, hardens over time, fossilizes. It can be difficult to know when and how to share.

Around that time, I started seeing someone casually and then developed an intense crush. I had the dim sense that my emotions were extremely raw and out of control and so I tried as much as possible to conceal them. I only mentioned what was going in my family in the vaguest way possible and he never asked me any follow up questions. I wanted most of all to be taken care of, but you cannot reasonably ask that of someone you have just met, least of all of young confused noncommittal men. I am normally very attached to independence, anyway. My sudden splat of neediness felt like falling. 

A few days after my mother had surgery, I went on a weekend afternoon date. It was very hot and we talked about our views on love for a very long time. The next day, he texted me to say that he had seen me in midtown that night waiting for the train. It felt implicitly like mockery, for being alone and sad and in an uncool neighborhood on a weekend night, and he was evasive about making further plans. I was having severe insomnia and I had gone to see an obscure movie in a theater uptown that was nearly empty and reassuringly dark. I thought about explaining myself but the slight, which is the stuff of teenage nightmares, felt shallow and pointless. That upset me less, though, than the sense I began to have that I had brought this upon myself with my inability to be really, truly vulnerable. That my (maybe fair) assumption that he would find my sadness overwhelming or off-putting was also a rationalization. In truth, I liked imagining that I was seen as needless, as fun, as a party girl always bopping around town whose life could effortlessly accommodate intimacy when someone chose to bestow it upon me and who wouldn’t miss it when it was gone. It made me feel shiny and incredibly powerful.

When the fling inevitably fizzled, I kept obsessing over this one detail, wondering if he was really mocking me or not, over what he had seen, over whether that was the catalyst. Everyone I shared my neurosis with thought I was overreacting. There were so many other issues. We didn’t even like each other that much. Surely no one cared that much where you were on a Saturday night. And if they did, well, why would you ever want to be with someone like that?

In an essay for Harper’s on Annie Ernaux, Tobi Haslett writes that: “Ransacked by sexual passion and held hostage by passing time, she writes to act out her passivity, inspect her own spectatorship, traverse the vast, blank territory where an “I” is meant to be.” The fundamental void at the heart of Ernaux’s authorial identity is a tension between her working class upbringing and the bourgeois language in which she writes, between her embodiment as a woman and the masculine conventions of literature. The project of self-spectatorship is fundamentally about a migration of the self—from the self or towards the self. Ernaux is also writing for her generation, of her generation, and on behalf of the generations that went before her, largely illiterate. 

This is different to a common contemporary conception of autofiction which is that it is, essentially, a story about yourself, separable from a work of nonfiction mainly in that it is assumed to be fallible. In France, the natural home of autofiction, they publish almost everything as novels, except reported or academic work, and so autofiction is also a problem of genre. Most things that would be published as autofiction in France would be published as memoir in this country but the commitments to form are not the same. Neither are the commitments to truth. Implicit in the idea of nonfiction is the notion that you will tell the truth, and the whole truth, that readers can broadly expect realism. 

But memory is not truthful. Reported work tends to account for that, portraying different perspectives, supplementing with documentation of other kinds. Part of understanding the self and your life experience as a part of something larger is to acknowledge that memory is fallible. In essence, to historicize it. 

Are we required to be historians of our own lives? Maybe to be able to do that successfully requires the kind of outsider status or “transfuge” (class migration) that Ernaux experienced. Self-identifying, as say James Franco does, as a child of the disaffected suburban bourgeoisie, may also be to historicize your life, but it’s not very interesting. That there is so much autofiction of this kind may just be a function of the mechanics of publishing and MFA demographics, but it may also be a broader indication of how class identity is formed and understood in the US, the insidious cliquishness of bourgeois self-image. 

Although she is first and foremost a documentarian of class, Ernaux is probably best known in English for her sex writing. In L’Occupation [The Possession], a very short book she published in 2002, she goes down an internet rabbit hole, relatably, trying to figure out who her ex is dating. She searches obsessively, looks up her building in the phone book, calls every number, calls someone’s cell phone number off their answering machine. She is aware that her behavior is wrong or a little crazy. She remarks that she has in the past judged people who behaved this way, a woman who constantly phoned her ex and his new girlfriend for years on end, harassing them. In hindsight, she sees herself as possessed by jealousy, like a demon.

“The only thing that was true,” she writes of bargaining with her ex over the phone, “and I never said it to him, was “I want to fuck you and make you forget the other woman.” All the rest was, literally, fiction.”

Here the problem runs deeper than a problem of narrative. It’s also a problem of truthfulness all together. No narrator is so unreliable as the narrator of a true (or truth-inflected) story. Autofiction adds an additional complication to the problem of memoir or autobiography by deliberately obscuring its relationship to the truth. The narrator of an autofictional novel is ostensibly a fictional character and the intimacy they appear to offer is deceptive. You can’t hold them to the facts as many readers try to do. 

This may be why so much contemporary autofiction centers around describing compulsions, addictions, obsessive desire, and so on. These are the urges that structure our lives, the highs. But to write about them is not necessarily to write them out in the therapeutic sense, to retrace the compulsion the way that behavioral therapy tries to in order to retrain it. There is a kind of naked naiveté to this wish, that by speaking something into the world, it will be expunged from you. 

To some extent, this is also a marketing tool. Podcaster and writer Honor Levy’s forthcoming first novel, helpfully titled My First Book, is described in marketing copy as “Walking the wire between imagination and confession.” Levy is known for being a convert to and evangelizer for Catholicism, which adds additional significance to the idea of “confession.” But to understand that, readers must be familiar with the biographical details of Levy’s life. At face value, it reads like a kind of technical explainer for the idea of autofiction. “Imagination” and “confession” are funny antonyms, regardless. They set up a tension at the core of autofiction, a warring impulse between unfiltered sincerity and the plausible deniability of fiction. Thinking of autofiction as a confessional may be a Catholic impulse but it is also a kind of therapy impulse. 

But to confess is not really to tell the truth, let alone to get at a truth—the implicit goal of literature. In a Vulture essay from 2018, a noted literary critic argued that thinking of autofiction as at all in the realm of nonfiction or memoir is an error of genre: instead autofiction is about the act of writing, about the authorial voice as a kind of alternative ego. This is basically similar to the definition of Ernaux’s project above, except that he goes on to posit fiction as rescuing essays from the mire of politics and ethics, from having to make statements. “Autofiction writers stand at a certain distance from the world — and the ethics and the politics — on display in their novels, as far or farther than authors of fictions that aren’t autobiographical at all.”

In other words, there is no pressure to be likable or (worse still) moral in fiction. At a remove from the self, the author is free to explore the darker, wormier cavities of being a person. Hence Sheila Heti’s pertinent title: How Should a Person Be? Heti has said in interviews that reality television, specifically “The Hills” was part of her inspiration for the book. If we are to take seriously the idea that autofiction offers a way to explore essayistic concepts without the burden of authorial responsibility, it is interesting to compare its conventions to those of reality television. Reality shows are clearly not reality, in the strict sense of the term. It is not just that they create unusual and artificial settings and scenarios for their participants. They are also heavily edited and, to varying degrees, scripted. 

In one nearly ubiquitous reality television formula, the edit cuts between action and interviews, where a cast member sits in front of the camera and addresses it directly, commenting on what the viewer has just seen. It is usually unclear exactly what the time lapse is like or to what extent the cast member is aware of the edit or of other things that may be happening around them. The interviews work to create a more solid veneer of reality but they also point out the artificiality of the whole structure. On the one hand, in the moment, the cast member may be acting out a kind of real or implied script, but looking into the camera, it feels like they are telling their truth. On the other hand, at times the filmed action appears to undermine the interviews, the way that two people often have a very different version of a conflict. Both ways of reading the formula bring the viewer into the story as a kind of active interpreter. You’re encouraged to take sides in reality television, to parse what is true and who is in the right, who is the hero of the story and who are the villains. 

In the most recent season of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” Kim sits on the couch, bleach blonde, wearing a tracksuit, and reads a Variety article out loud to her sister, Khloé, which claims some of the sisters’ personal dramas have been largely omitted from the show, calling attention to what is kept private in a family notorious for sharing. In alternating sequences, dressed in a strapless bustier top and heavily made up, Kim tells the camera “I like to read things to be up on what people are trying to say.” She goes on to rebut the article, claiming that they “shared everything.” In response to the accusation that Ye was a non-presence on the series, Kim retorts, “You can’t film with someone that’s not a cast member.”

This is also a problem of genre. Evolved enough to incorporate meta-critique but still bound by the laws of cinema, this kind of reality framework hovers between voyeurism and plausible deniability. Unlike the amoral notion of autofiction presented above, reality television tends to be profoundly self-righteous. It is also explicitly prurient. It encourages the viewer to pry, often dialoguing explicitly with media coverage that digs into the personal lives of cast members. This kind of interchange is one of the Vulture critic’s gripes with many critiques of autofiction that focus heavily on similarity between author and narrator or that look for gossipy details. The serious reader, in his view, will focus on the meta-production of fiction or of the ego contained within the novel, on the philosophical digressions, pleasingly unhampered by a commitment to ethics. 

If this seems like a Trojan horse for an argument about the death of the author, the staggering quantity of autofiction being produced suggests, on the contrary, that the author is alive and well. It is harder to ignore authors when they have to work to brand themselves as personalities (often very similar to the ones in their books). If autofiction is inextricable from the era of reality television, it is also inextricable from the era of the internet, which produces the kind of media feedback loop described above. It may appear that autofiction is used as a mechanism to distance the author from their own opinions because many authors are so overexposed. 

It is worth noting that the French, obsessed with autofiction, are not particularly concerned with separation between author and ego. Where it exists, it is more in the Ernaux sense, in that the author excavates their sense of self into a vehicle for narrative, and less in the sense that they cannot be taken at face value. When Ernaux dismisses all of her schemes and ruminating in L’Occupation as “literally, fiction,” she is concerned with interrogating her capacity for honesty, not with distancing herself from the person she was. What is fascinating about Ernaux is in some ways the opposite, how interested she is in forensically exploring the self she has been at different times. Those selves are distinct from her own self, separated by the gulf of age and social mobility and the transience of love affairs. But they are all manifestly herself.

But Ernaux is also a deeply political writer. In this she differs from the poster child for the depoliticization of autofiction, Karl Ove. In a seminal essay for The New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell excoriates Knausgaard for his disinterest in ethical claims. Instead, she writes, he favors a mawkish kind of empathy. Fiction for Knausgaard is also a liminal space, insulated against the moral problems of the outside world. This allows him to arrive at the kind of monstrous empathy he embraces in his famous series titled in English, My Struggle. Serpell quotes an acceptance speech he gave, published in The New Yorker, at length: 

The difference between engaging with a real neighbor and one in a novel is that the former occurs in the social sphere, within the boundaries of its rules and practical constraints, whereas the latter occurs outside of it, in the reader’s own most private, intimate sphere, where the rules that govern our social interaction do not apply and its practical constraints do not exist. Only there, in that encounter, are we able to see the concept of the social and see exactly what it is. And only there, in that encounter, are we able to see what a human being is outside of that concept, in itself and on its own terms.

It may be surprising, after reading this, to discover how committed Knausgaard was to brutal honesty. He alienated friends and family in the process of writing his autofictional hexalogy, revealed intimate secrets, caused his wife to be hospitalized with a breakdown. I think generally writers are entitled to write with unsparing candor about their lives and about the world around them, whatever the consequences. But it does suggest that the veneer of fiction in the series has little to do with a lack of biographical details or the potential for fallibility. Instead, the genre offers him distance from the rules and constraints of the world and from the norms of social behavior where you generally do not reveal the secrets and foibles of people you love to millions of readers. In other words, Knausgaard also claims a need to step outside of the tangle of ethics and morals to encounter some kind of truth.

Unlike in much other reality television, on Showtime’s hit series, “Couples Therapy,” the cameras are hidden. There are no interviews, no cuts, no staged conflicts. Even the edits are nearly invisible, often made so seamless as to give the impression of “real” time. On “Couples Therapy,” a series of couples sit down with psychotherapist Orna Guralnik over several sessions and engage in therapy. Although the office where the sessions are filmed is a set, it was built to closely resemble Guralnik’s own office—a Nathan Fielder kind of trick. The cameras are also concealed from the cast members, suggesting an illusion of vulnerability: perhaps, in the heat of self-exploration, they have forgotten they are being filmed. 

“Couples Therapy” reveals a fixation on authenticity that belies the actual content of the show where the cast members are all shown to be profoundly lacking in self-understanding. Orna, whose practice lies at some intersection of family systems therapy, psychoanalysis, and general behavioral psychology, is less interested in big revelations and more interested in teasing out dynamics, in what is kept private even in the intimacy of a coupling, in how capable most people are of spinning starkly delusional narratives. But the show’s cunning editing clearly obviates a lot of this. One couple chose not to speak about their older child to protect her privacy. It is clear, watching with an eye to cuts, that the dynamics have been stitched together. The show switches back and forth between different sessions, building a tapestry of psychological discovery. A lot of us, you start to see, are fucked up in the same way. Or maybe Orna’s line of questioning finds those similarities. Or maybe it is just the juxtaposition. A bunch of fucked up people on reality TV, side by side. 

Group feedback sessions with other therapists stand in for interviews on “Couples Therapy.” Orna seeks out help when she feels lost and is often encouraged to empathize—with one particularly loathsome man, for instance. The therapists all resolutely ignore the camera like the cast members. Orna appears more vulnerable in these sequences. She is also fallible. It becomes clear how she directs the conversations; the show points it out But she still never breaks character. We know nothing about her life, about her feelings, her motivations. She always appears slightly bland and anonymous, always perceiving, even at her most unguarded, the way that therapists often are. 

By maintaining Orna’s discretion, the show subtly discourages identification with her. We see everything through her eyes. It’s her edit, after all (more or less). But the show offers an illusion of being perceived, a sense that the generic insights it tends to front are also specifically applicable to you, the viewer. Guralnik has said that the aim of the show is not to air out people’s drama, but to track “the deep work that real therapy entails.” In this sense, it’s similar to a lot of self-help literature. It’s a bit like microdosing therapy, providing a general sense of self-betterment, without, as they say, doing the work.

In contrast to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” “Couples Therapy” is resolutely un-self-aware. But its form also offers a kind of protective shield from realism. It is depicting unvarnished therapy on screen but not really. The point is not the reality of it all, in case the viewer becomes confused, but the truth about humanity that it is able to grasp. More succinctly, the point is to empathize. 

Empathy, writes Serpell, “is selfish.” Surely we should be able to care about the suffering of others without trying to imagine it happening to us. Focusing narrowly on the experiential reduces everything to the ego (be it the author’s ego or the protagonist’s). The world can only exist through their eyes, from their perception. Autofiction rarely strays beyond that. Divorced from politics and the weighty considerations of society, exploring the self too much becomes mostly an exercise in delusion. It is surprisingly hard to be honest with yourself. Viewing the reader as a kind of lodestar, someone to keep you honest, brings out the echoes of transference that lace through much contemporary autofiction. The writer is never really alone. They seek, narcissistically, to impress the reader, to bring pleasure, to exonerate themselves. 

Telling the story I told at the start of this to someone else, say over drinks, I’d probably leave out the illness almost entirely, even though that was the thing occupying my mind all summer, obsessively and almost to the exclusion of everything else. I’d leave out how I drifted around the city all summer, to and from work, to and from parties, feeling like my feet were floating above the surface of the earth. How I would probably have tried to get any man I met at that time to attach to me, to care for me, to love me.  I’d talk instead about rejection, about sex, about intellectual competitiveness, about romantic fixation as the core of my existence and not as a smokescreen to distract me from my other feelings.

Part of this is just logistical. Telling someone over drinks about your crush is very different than telling someone over drinks about your mother’s cancer diagnosis. The second one is kind of a buzzkill. People are weird about that kind of thing. No one really knows how to react. We don’t have good social mores for how to interact with death, with illness, with suffering. It’s frightening also, it feels contagious, like if you dwell with it too long, it will catch up with you too. In a much mocked and memefied template about how to set boundaries with a needy friend, a writer suggests saying, I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you right now. Can we connect at [a later date]? Although it’s a natural and inevitable part of human experience to undergo loss, grief, uncertainty, in this format, it is transformed into an emotional burden cast upon everyone else around you who is just trying to get on with their lives. The veneer of romance has a glamor to it that’s much more appealing and makes people want to talk to you more. 

Reading this, you would likely get the sense that I am not very truthful. Or at least that I am emotionally closed off, that I share very little about my inner life. So if I’m being honest, there’s more to it, all of which seems pettier. My sense of being socially weird, an alien cast down into a scene that’s something like a giant prep school, my extreme competitiveness—a poisonous mixture of arrogance and insecurity, my horror at the idea of being gossiped about. How I always envy the men I date, their confidence, their ease, how little they seem to care about the things that make me sick with anxiety, to the point where sometimes I suspect all my desire for them is just a desire to get close enough to them that I can change, metamorphose into something better and brighter and more likable. 

But these are also mostly generic insights about a fairly common problem: struggling with human connection, with the shifting family dynamics that the specter of illness and death entail, with the lopsided care work ingrained in heterosexuality. Isolated from the tangle of social context, digging into the self becomes nothing so much an exercise in fruitlessness. The psyche is like an ocean: layers upon layers of debris. The further down you go, the heavier the weight of mass, all that water above you.

All literature, to some extent, is literature about the self. It is impossible, really, to write about anything other than yourself. Meaning is imbued by the writer, stories given shape. But all literature is also, to a great extent, a product of its time, of external forces, of the author’s canon and, despite what anyone may say, their biography. I am not very interested in the notion of a literature divorced from accountability, from personal opinion, from responsibility, from politics, from ethics. That’s the blandest thing you’ve ever read. That’s someone’s CBT journal. That feels like resignation, giving up, on some level, on the world and everything else in it.