If you’re writer, you may have gotten this question at some point in your writing life, from a friend or relative or a stranger on a train whom you shared a story with. How do you answer?

But, first, let’s start at the beginning. About six weeks ago, I enrolled in a course called “Intro to Autofiction” through GrubStreet.

I have been working on a project on and off for about two decades (yikes!) and one of the places where I kept faltering was when I asked myself: “How much of this is true?” or “This is true, so should I put it in?” and “How will people react?”

What I was actually asking was: “Can I tell my story without telling all of it?”; “Can I keep some parts true and make up others?” and “Is it okay to hide some parts and experiences of myself and my life, while at the same time centering them?” And also, “how do I do that?” (I don’t think I’ll stop figuring this last one out.)

It may seem that these questions are not a big deal. Writers do mix up fact and fiction. But, as I went through my course, I realized that autofiction doesn’t provide an answer to what’s factual or fictional writing, but offers a bridge between the two.

The first person that I read for this class was Renee Gladman specifically an excerpt from her book To After That (TOAF), published by Dorothy: A Publishing Project in 2008.

This was not a short story but nor was it memoir. It was a piece about a woman–an African American woman–walking around New York City and thinking about writing and how to write a story. It’s rare to discover books where the flaneur isn’t white, and if they aren’t, it’s rare to find that the story doesn’t revolve around or come back to some aspect of their identity vis-a-vis the mainstream, white/Western culture.

An an Indian Muslim woman, and a recent immigrant to the US, Gladman’s book set me free in this way where instead of asking myself: “How much of this is true” and “Should I/Can I put this in?” I said: “Oh, so I can do that?!”

That was when I also realized that perhaps my project could fit into this ambiguous, amorphous space within writing called autofiction. But, how exactly did Gladman do this and more reflections from reading TOAF in my next post.

Thanks for reading!