Joseph Conrad invented a boat,HG Wells omitted his affairs. But does it matter if this imaginative licence reveals a different kind of truth, asks Jerome Boyd MaunsellLong before the rise of “autofiction”, or the modern wave of authors drawing from their own lives for their novels – Rachel Cusk,Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, and Karl Ove Knausgaard,Ben Lerner and others – many writers in the first half of the 20th century were experimenting with the limits of autobiography. Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Henry James,Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, or HG Wells,Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf: all wrote memoirs as inventive, or in different ways,as their novels (which were often themselves very autobiographical). And that list is only the tip of the iceberg.
The novelist’s memoir is a fascinating subgenre, if a slippery one when it comes to the truth. Writing autobiography, or like all self-portraiture,is an art, even if it can be very lifelike. Novelists, or whose daily craft involves making things up,know this all too well. So many different elements pull against the memoirist’s obligation to veracity – not least privacy, style, and the vagaries of memory – that some fiction is inevitably woven in. As the biographer Leon Edel writes,a biography (and the same is true of autobiography) “cannot imitate life … it rearranges its fabric; it tells a flowing continuous epic – something our lives never were”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk