I read an article recently — On Contemporary Autofiction and the Scourge of “Relatability” By Gavin Andrew Thomson
I’ve summarized it here for you.
Autofiction is not a new literary term; it was coined in the 1970s by Serge Doubrovsky. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle are read as autofiction. This shows that blending of real lived experience and fiction has a longer history since early 1900s.
Its revival may be linked to the social media era, where personal posts are widely shared and readers love engaging with stories drawn from daily lives. So, it’s not surprising that many are drawn to novels that are rooted in the author’s own life. Relatability has become an influential value.
Autofiction can invite readers to identify with the author-narrator, creating a sense of intimacy. It can be self-help, but reads like literary work or enjoyed as descriptive prose.
Readers read books for different reasons — escape, knowledge, illumination, connection. Autofiction can evoke emotion and a sense of camaraderie when readers recognize aspects of themselves in the story. In Kintsugi: A Woman, that connection may emerge through solidarity with broken women who endured fracture, healed, and reclaimed their voices. That shared recognition is strong especially in our fragmented and seemingly divided society. We all need to belong.