In Defense of French Autofiction

Or of the self. 

By Kate Sibery

Disclaimer: All translations in this piece (except for book titles) were done by the writer.

“Dans ce livre je n’invente rien, et j’assume complètement la notion d’autofiction. Mais, en même temps, il s’agit d’un roman, dans lequel tout est vrai, et tout est faux également.” - Cécile Balavoine, “J’ai compris l’autofiction le jour où je suis moi même devenue personnage,” RadioFrance, 2023

(In this book I’m not inventing anything, and I completely assume the notion of autofiction. But, at the same time, it’s a novel, in which everything is true, and everything is equally false.)

It was in a 2023 interview with RadioFrance that French novelist and French language professor at Columbia University in Paris Cécile Balavoine declared her unwavering adherence to autofictional writing. As a genre, autofiction proves difficult to define. In the French tradition of literary categorization, autofiction is a rendering of the self that relies on certain facts of the author’s lived experience while also employing fictional conventions. “Everything is true, and everything is equally false.” 

When I asked Balavoine what it meant for her to identify as a writer of autofiction, she cut in just as my words tapered off: “After my first novel came out, I do remember some people coming up to me and even to my family, my friends and asking … ‘So when are you going to write a real novel?’”

Baked into that line of interrogation is some sense that writing autofiction requires no invention, no imagination—that the genre is somehow easier to write. But for Balavoine, although the facts of the lived experience are there, memory can be a fickle thing, and the task of using language to build the self and the atmosphere—what she calls “the little music of the novel”—persists. “I don’t think that autofiction is less than pure fiction that you have invented; you put yourself in danger, you are going to the bone because you really reveal what you have in the stomach, your guts, and when you do that you confront yourself. You have to find the right words, the right sentences, the right rhythm, the right atmosphere to say it as best as you can, and to translate it for your readers as best as you can,” she said. 

The first time I encountered a work of autofiction—or what I thought was a work of autofiction—was when I read L’événement (2000) (The Happening) by Annie Ernaux in October 2022, a few days before seeing her speak at Barnard, and a few days after she won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. In a little under 150 pages, the book recounts the narrator’s experience as a young student attempting to obtain an abortion in 1960s France, twelve years before the procedure was legalized. The book makes no room for sentimentality; it does not force itself to tune into the musical quality so pervasive in novelistic writing but rather makes a sustained cutting motion, dissecting the experience through a language that refuses to adopt what Ernaux calls “la poésie du souvenir” (the poetry of memory). Despite her methodical reconstruction of past events and acknowledgment that she is writing about her own life, Ernaux emphatically rejects the labeling of her work as autofiction. As Sam Sacks, writer of the Fiction Chronicle at The Wall Street Journal, said to me, “Annie Ernaux writes about herself, but she writes about herself as though she is not herself, but sort of observing herself as an anthropologist of this character who is Annie Ernaux.” 

It’s what Balavoine described as a confrontation with the self through a fictional mode that makes autofiction—or at least works with an autofictional sensibility—so fascinating to me. Since early December of last year, I’ve been playing with this consideration of how writers, specifically contemporary French writers, confront themselves before an audience of readers. I don’t normally read much contemporary fiction. However, every other Wednesday evening between December and April, I made my way to the long dining table in the kitchen of Columbia’s Maison Française, where I joined a group of 17 or so undergraduate and graduate students to discuss works of contemporary French literature. It was at that table that I became obsessed with how French authors render the figure of the self.

Illustration by Selin Ho

The group, known as the Groupe Goncourt, gathers to read and discuss a selection of works of contemporary French literature nominated in the previous year for the nation’s most prestigious literary prize, Le Prix Goncourt. Simulating the official Prix, Columbia’s Groupe Goncourt and its counterparts from 10 other participating universities each vote for their chosen work to be considered for the Choix Goncourt des États-Unis (U.S. Goncourt Prize). In late April at the Villa Albertine, a French bookstore and cultural center on the Upper East Side, delegates from each university meet to defend their respective group’s book choice before bringing it to a vote and toasting their new winner with a flute of champagne. 

Led by an adjunct professor in Columbia’s French department, Dr. Laurence Marie, and participating for the second year in a row, Columbia’s Groupe Goncourt read six of the books nominated for the 2023 prize, which was awarded in early November of the same year. The reading list included Triste Tigre by Neige Sinno, Sarah, Susanne et l’écrivain by Éric Reindhart, Humus by Gaspard Koenig, Proust, roman familial by Laure Murat, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s L’échiquier, and the official prize-winning novel, Veiller sur elle by Jean Baptiste Andrea. Each meeting began with a ceremonial go-around during which everyone shared their thoughts on the week’s reading. I always wanted to go toward the end of the go-around—that way I would have enough time to rehearse in my head what I planned to say, and maybe pick up some new word or turn of phrase from the enviably fluid and expressive French spoken by the native speakers of the group. 

The book that won the official Prix Goncourt was lauded by some members of the selection jury for its traditionally novelistic qualities. Set primarily in Italy during the rise of fascism Veiller sur elle traces the life of Mimo, a young and talented sculptor carrying the weight of a tortured love for his childhood best friend, Viola. For many jury members, the book is, to use Balavoine’s phrase, “a real novel.” In a Huffington Post article, long-time Goncourt jury member Françoise Chandernagor praised the fact that this year’s winner was “un vrai roman” (a real novel), adding, “Ça manque un peu. Aujourd’hui, les gens ont tendance à raconter leur vie,” (This has been missing. Today, people have a tendency to recount their lives). Implicit in Chandernagor’s final comment is the same pejorative view of autofiction of which Balavoine spoke, rooted in the notion that writing directly and openly about one’s own life requires less imagination, and that the final product will somehow be less “literary.” Chandernagor isn’t alone in the sentiment, but her comments speak to a persistent divide in the Académie Goncourt between those who favor the more traditional novel and those who are open to more experimental novelistic forms. The debate was particularly heated in the selection process for the 2022 prize. The Jury chose the winning book, Vivre vite by Brigitte Giraud, a work of autofiction, after 14 rounds of deliberation. And still, one jury member insisted that Giraud’s novel was only a “petite autobiographie” (a little autobiography). I haven’t read Vivre vite, but I think diminishing the novel to the status of a little autobiography reflects a desire to diminish works of autofiction and to ignore the complexity of writing from memory, and of the self as a literary subject. The terms “autobiography” and even “memoir” don’t adequately seize and wrench open the space that the passage of time and the slippery nature of memory create between a writer’s self and a writer’s subject, although the two subjects are on the surface one and the same. 

We voted in early April, ranking our choices from one to four, and so selected Sinno’s Triste Tigre, which went on to win the overall U.S. Goncourt Prize a few weeks later, as our winner. In my personal ranking, Triste Tigre fell second to Reindhart’s Sarah, Susanne et l’écrivain, largely because I became obsessed with the latter’s narrative structure. The book is written as a sort of triptych dialogue between the author, Sarah, and Sarah’s literary double, Susanne, over the course of which Sarah recounts the unraveling of her marriage and family while the figure of the author translates it into the fictional narrative of Susanne. Sinno’s book, by contrast, is pointedly not a novel, but rather a hybrid of many genres of writing that Sinno harnesses in an effort to bring readers inside her head as she studies herself—recounting and disassembling the experience and aftermath of being sexually abused by her stepfather as a child. While Sinno refuses to place the book within the bounds of any one genre of writing (many regarding it as “inclassable”), there were moments while reading during which I felt the text knocking up against the amorphous body of literature that calls itself autofiction. Like Ernaux, Sinno persistently muddles the “Je” of her book, at times holding it, and subsequently the reader, so deep within her mind that my impulse to read it as an autofiction is heightened. But she loves to break things too, distorting the sense of intimacy between herself and the reader just as quickly as it was established; as she writes in Triste Tigre, “Je suis celle à qui c’est arrivé. Qui est le je qui parle ici?” (I am the one this happened to. Who is the “I” speaking here?). 

What I find compelling in works of autofiction, though some authors—such as Ernaux and Sinno—reject that terminology, is the pointed divergence between author, narrator, and character. Writing about the self is effectively an act of translation; memories, self-conception, and the words themselves all coalesce to create a version of the self unique to the page. It’s a selfish interest, I admit. I often treat myself as the subject of whatever I’m writing and struggle with the inevitable divergence between the “I” that is thinking (writing in my head really) and the “I” that I commit to the page. In a 2021 interview with the The New Yorker, Lois Lowry was asked whether dreams and memories reveal truth or are stories that we tell ourselves. In her answer, she talks about watching an old videotape of a birthday party she attended as a kid, saying that it was funny to watch because, in her memory, she was always standing on the outskirts, observing everyone else play. But then she saw herself in the video running around, playing with the rest of the kids. Writing about myself, I’m both the kid running around, losing myself in play, and the one on the periphery, watching. 

Perhaps this is all my way of saying that the complexity of rendering the self through writing is a factor of distance, at least in part. Ernaux does not consider herself a writer of autofiction, classifying many of her works as “auto-socio-biographies,” because she perches herself at a distance. And because her “I” is an inherently impersonal one—simply a means of seizing the greater sociological, historical, and familial contexts within which she exists. I understand Ernaux’s project, but find it difficult to believe that the core of the self—one’s center of emotion and feeling—doesn’t somehow make its home in that forever exhilarating and terrifying declaration, “I.”