Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?

 Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?

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"Where does this leave invention? The question of its meaning and value seems to grip the current tranche of autofictioneers, keen to probe the hierarchies and hypocrisies that impose themselves on writing. Long have aspiring fiction writers been told to write what they know, only to find themselves criticised for lacking imagination. In other words, give voice to your subjectivity but avoid narcissism; make it up, or we’ll think you can’t. Tell the truth, or we’ll think you’re a liar."

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"To write autofiction, however, requires a willingness to treat oneself as the central character, a countercultural celebrity, and this is probably what has sparked resistance to it. It requires ego, it demands the bold determination to make a mark. In the case of Cusk, that started some time ago, when she wrote about motherhood and divorce in A Life’s Work and Aftermath and faced a censure that declared itself on behalf of the unknown others – the children, the husband – in her story. It seemed a convenient moment for such scruples to arise in a culture otherwise fairly used to the blithe incorporation of others’ lives, and it brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s imagined objections of those who would thwart female creativity in Three Guineas:

    But to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body, for when the body seller has sold her momentary pleasure she takes good care that the matter shall end there. But when a brain seller has sold her brain, its anaemic, vicious and diseased progeny are let loose upon the world to infect and corrupt and sow the seeds of disease in others. Thus we are asking you, Madam, to pledge yourself not to commit adultery of the brain because it is a much more serious offence than the other.