Autofiction authors articulate a physical revulsion toward invented narrative

Evidence

Just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous, I reacted in a physical way … Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone has made up … made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world … It was a crisis … I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value … The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality … Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 108

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Knausgaard crisis-avowal quoted as the emblem of immediacy’s anti-fiction stance — speaks to the reader’s project of naming immediacy features and her defense of mediation.