01/02/2024
Autofiction. Stevan, 2024. What the bloody hell is autofiction? It’s not autobiography. It’s not memoir. It’s not fully fiction. I’ve been thinking a lot about it – its capacity and mendacity – for over forty years. I’ve had a go at writing two autofictions. And right now I’m finishing a new one. All the novels I’ve published so far are more or less highly schematised autofictions. Whose novel isn’t? Anyway, the topic came up in a recent kōrero with a friend (kia ora Sarany!). ‘Stevan, it was you in Shanghai Boy,’ she asked, smiling. ‘Wasn’t it?’ She was referring to the main character in my rainbow novel set in noughties Shanghai. ‘Oh, totally!’ I said after taking another sip of white wine in the sunshine and feeling merry. Only a few days later I began thinking to myself: Hmm, actually he’s not me at all. Or rather, he’s only almost entirely me. Other bits of me were lopped off. Dropped. Suppressed. Naturally. Other bits of me in him are thinned out – or spun out – for the sake of the story. The stories in the story. At one point, for example, he feels so helplessly depressed about his life that he starts crying at a uni staff meeting. I never did do that, darn it! Also, he tries to kill his father. And a lover. And has a bach at Woodend. And so on and so forth, etcetera etcetera, as every storyteller knows. And we’re all storytellers, are we not? That’s being human. Dogs and octopus too, very likely. Ants? The cosmos? Ehara rānei tatou? And most important of all, conceivably: should writers shut up about such slithery things and get back to the task of striking rows of black ciphers onto white surfaces and do their best to make it interesting for readers to run their eyes along those rows?
This pic shows me with my translator and gifted friend, Annie Shih, at the launch of the Chinese edition of Oracles and Miracles, in Shanghai in 2002. The photographer: Hu Xiaomang.
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