During a conversation with Lit Hub Radio’s Thresholds podcast, Jordan Kisner, author of the new essay collection Thin Places, discusses the difference between autobiographical fiction and autofiction and how he walks the line.
Autofiction is a new (to us!) term but not a new concept. Autofiction presents biography or memoir as though it were fiction. The author may write in the third person or craft true life events using the structure of fiction, but the stories are factual. Autobiographical fiction – the kind Kisner writes – blends events that actually happened to the author with fictional elements, and sometimes imposes a fictional narrator.
“Some of it is my deepest held feelings and thoughts, and a lot of it is not,” he says. “I love not feeling any obligation to distinguish which are the things that I feel in my heart and which aren’t. There are some really true things in these characters, inner monologues that I’ve worried about and thought. And there are some where I’m like, oh god, this is terrible what he’s thinking here. I should keep that; that’s interesting.”
