“Everything is Real”: Articulating Autofiction

 In October 2021, the culture site Lit Hub published a cheeky advice column by Walker Caplan. To help readers define “autofiction,” the piece offers ten grounding principles for whether a work falls under its purview. They range from “autofiction is when a character lives in New York” to “when you write about something bad you’ve done, that’s autofiction. When you write about something bad done to you, that’s memoir.” Albeit satirical, the list elucidates enduring anxieties about clarifying the genre.

Fournier pronounces that “the history of feminism is, in . . .