How About Adding Horror To Your Memoir? (or is that autofiction?)

After watching the film, Sinners on Thursday night, I've been thinking about the parameters of memoir and autofiction

This week I have been thinking about autofiction as an interesting alternative to memoir, and because I’ve been thinking about it, I have started to recognise it in surprising places.

When I say autofiction, I mean a story that is clearly based on the author’s life, but with significant leaps of the imagination, which are fictional. Autofiction also has a self-consciousness about it: the author might name themselves as the main protagonist, and might also draw attention to the mechanics of storytelling itself. By explicitly objectifying themselves as a character, or persona in a story they themselves have created (about themselves), an author draws attention to the slippery nature of truth and self.

Autofiction is a good option for those writers who are worried about offending or exposing loved ones or themselves, and who don’t want to be pulled up for not having all the facts right. It also, it seems, is good if you want to be playful and to introduce a surprise element - imagine if those leaps of the imagination involved a bit of magical realism!

Miranda July’s, All Fours is considered autofiction, in that the main protagonist, although not named Miranda, shares a lot of similarities with July: age, profession, in mid life, with a single child. But because it’s fiction, July can take risks. She can push her protagonist’s sexual exploits, for instance, because they won’t be presumed to be hers.

In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado is memoir in that it is clearly a personal story about lesbian abuse, but it is also autofiction in its playfulness and its nodding to different literary tropes, like the gothic genre, for instance, and experimenting with different voices, and points of view (she writes mostly in second person).

There are many other writers of autofiction - Annie Ernaux; Rachel Cusk; Doireann ni Ghriofa; Edouard Louis…

But on Thursday night I came away from the movie theatre imagining a different kind of autofiction - if you can even call it that. I wonder what you think. I watched a film called Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler (director of Creed and Black Panther), which is a period drama horror suspense, based in prewar southern America, about anti-hero good / bad twin brothers (both played by Michael B Jordon), and the resonance of Blues (and music in general).