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Despite recent controversies over ‘faked’ memoirs, most readers of life writing continue to trust in the autobiographical pact: they believe that memoirs are a source of personal truth, a writer’s outlet for laying bare the past. But some argue that the codes and conventions of memoir inscribe a distance between self and subject. Before writers are able to tell the truth to their readers, moreover, they have to confront and process that truth themselves over and over again. Writers of autobiographically based fiction (or autofiction, autobiografiction) have long known that the work of truth‐telling must start well before publication: the practice of writing in this form demands repeated self‐revelation and intimacy with the truth of one’s own life history in a way that memoir may not. In this essay, I embrace the self‐reflective methodologies of life‐writing practice in order to identify and interrogate the ways in which writers of autobiographically based fiction, including myself, process the truth of their pasts in order to reanimate and rewrite that past via a variety of imagined potentialities. I use a self‐reflective analysis of the trajectory of truth‐telling in my own writing over time and then turn to examine the work of J. G. Ballard, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Jack Kerouac, and Louisa May Alcott using the revelations in their life writings to produce alternative readings of their fictions. By doing so, I will propose a practical tool for examining that most elusive textual artefact: the writer’s imagination. While the life writing of these writers reveal a single, nominalist, reading of the facts of their lives, that is, their novels demonstrate the power of fiction to unfold hidden potentialities, and further, multiplying facets of truth around those facts. I hope to demonstrate, moreover, the usefulness of the practice‐based insights that life writing practitioners can bring to textual analysis as I examine the process of writing autobiographically based fiction from the inside out.
Contemporary critical practice is becoming increasingly self‐reflective, with first person commentary and subjective musings appearing in academic texts produced across disciplines. On the other hand, as the number of writing practitioners in the academy mounts, their works reflect a growing awareness of, and engagement with, the critical and theoretical debates that surround creative practice. Nowhere is this interchange between theory and practice more prevalent, however, than in the discipline of life writing, a field concerned with the forces at work on the borderland between the self or subject and the performance of that self in communicable form. Yet the two groups, life writing critics and life writing creatives, often remain mutually suspicious and their relationship under‐theorised. This Special Cluster of Literature Compass brings together scholarly readings, both critical and creative in form, which interrogate the place of life writing in critical practice. These essays were developed through discussions and debates at the 7th Biennial International Auto/Biographical Association Conference at University of Sussex in June 2010. IABA has led the professionalization of life writing as a field of literary critical debate and is increasingly being used as a forum for life writers as well. In this Special Cluster, leading figures in the field, both critics and practitioners, begin a dialogue on the developing phenomenon of creative/critical interface in life writing, and make suggestions for new pathways for the future.
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