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| Lucia Berlin in Albuquerque, 1963 Photo by Buddy Berlin |
The Short Autofictions of Eve Babitz, Lucia Berlin and Bette Howland
NINA ELLIS
23 August 2022
ABSTRACT
What happens when autofiction meets the short form? Coined in France in the late 1970s, the term ‘autofiction’ refers to writing that blurs the boundary between fiction and fact. It is currently enjoying a vogue in the Anglophone publishing world, where it is used almost exclusively to refer to novel-length works. However, shorter autofictions have existed in English for decades. This study considers the short stories of the late-twentieth-century American writers Bette Howland, Lucia Berlin and Eve Babitz – who have recently been labeled ‘autofiction writers’ – and asks what happens to the genre when it is adapted to the short form. Howland’s Blue in Chicago (1978) demonstrates that brevity brings out the constructed aspects of autofiction. Throughout Berlin’s writing, the contrasts between short autofictions about similar but not identical events equally accentuate the fictional qualities of her work. And in Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), Babitz disrupts the short story collection, as a form, by interspersing her stories with love notes to a reader who isn’t quite fictional, but isn’t quite real. This paper concludes that shortness requires readers to engage with the ‘fiction’ half of the genre, which is too often overlooked in discussions of longer autofictional texts.
In 1976, The Atlantic Monthly published ‘Angels Laundromat,’ by Lucia Berlin (1936–2004): the first of many short stories in which Berlin’s narrator shares her name.1 ‘He liked my name,’ the fictional Lucia says of a stranger she befriends in a laundromat, ‘pronounced it in Italian. Luchia.’2 The following year, Eve Babitz (1943–2020) published Slow Days, Fast Company, a short fiction collection in which the line between her life and the lives of her narrators becomes increasingly difficult to discern. ‘I was a little amazed that one of my sultry glimpses of this coast could inspire someone’ to ‘write me a fan letter,’ says the narrator of ‘Bakersfield,’ a ‘sultry glimpse’ into Californian travels very like her own.3 In 1978, Bette Howland (1937–2017) published her story collection Blue in Chicago, which once more makes a point that the narrators share many aspects of their author’s identity and experience. ‘It’s Bette, Ma. Bet-te Lee,’ says a character in ‘How We Got the Old Woman to Go,’ reintroducing the protagonist to her dying grandmother with her author’s first and middle names.4
If Berlin, Babitz and Howland were engaged in a project of bringing their lives to the page and transforming them there, recent readers tend to relate their fiction back to their biographies. Bridget Read deems Berlin ‘a pioneer of auto-fiction before there was such a thing as auto-fiction’; Lauren Sarazen observes that ‘Babitz’s blurring of the line between genres calls to mind the faddish term “autofiction”’; and Howland’s New York Times obituary states that ‘Blue in Chicago, Ms. Howland’s second book, is largely autobiographical.’5 Part of the appeal may be their riveting life stories. Berlin lived in dozens of homes across the United States, Mexico and Chile and raised her four sons as a single mother while struggling with alcoholism; Babitz was a Los Angeles socialite who had affairs with famous musicians, battled drug addiction and was scarred by a fire; and Howland raised her two children as a single mother in Chicago, where she was institutionalized following a suicide attempt (she was also Saul Bellow’s lover and protégée).
Babitz, Berlin and Howland share an interest in blurring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, but they also share a career path: after achieving limited recognition during the 1970s and 1980s, they all faded from the public eye before being ‘rediscovered’ by the literary world over the past decade. As Honor Moore observes of Howland,
[t]hat Bette is being revived now makes her a member of a cohort who have benefited from the forty-year gap between the end of a woman’s youth and beauty when, at say forty, one’s reputation goes dark, until eighty or so, when one becomes a discovery!6
In 2014, Lili Anolik’s Vanity Fair profile of Babitz triggered a surge of interest which led to reissues by the New York Review of Books, Simon & Schuster and Counterpoint Press; in 2015, Berlin’s posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women became a New York Times bestseller for Farrar, Straus & Giroux and was translated into more than twenty languages; and in 2019 the literary magazine A Public Space began their publishing imprint, A Public Space Books, in order to bring Howland’s work back into print.
Why now? A clue lies in the way in which the three authors’ books have been rebranded: as ‘autofiction,’ a term coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky on the back-cover blurb of his novel Fils in 1977, around the time that Babitz, Berlin and Howland published the works for which they are now best known. The terms in which Doubrovsky defines ‘autofiction’ – as a place ‘where the language of adventure has been entrusted to the adventure of language in its total freedom’7 – also speak to these writers’ formal boldness. Doubrovsky went on to pinpoint four specific elements of autofiction. The first two speak to its roots in nonfiction: the shared name between author and protagonist, and the narration of real events. The second two emerge from fiction: the labeling of these works as novels rather than autobiographies, and a choice to experiment with chronology.8 Critics have subsequently built on Doubrovsky’s definition,9 but the core remains constant: autofiction is a form that defines itself as fiction while using, and taking liberties with, the facts.
Since 2000, this genre-between-genres has enjoyed a particular vogue in the Anglophone world, with a series of critically acclaimed and commercially successful ‘first-person novels that appear to be more or less verifiable accounts of the experiences of their authors, complete with protagonists who share their names’: for instance, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-part My Struggle series (translated from the Norwegian).10 This new wave was met with acclaim, with the first volume of My Struggle celebrated on Knausgård’s American publisher’s website as a ‘rare work of dazzling literary originality.’11 Critical responses have often been dominated by an ethically laden language of truth-telling. James Wood proclaims that ‘Knausgård is intense and utterly honest’ in My Struggle, and Joshua Rothman declares that he ‘imagines a kind of ultimate freedom […] based in radical openness.’ Thessaly La Force calls How Should a Person Be? ‘playful, funny, wretched, and absolutely true,’ while Toby Lichtig writes that Leaving the Atocha Station ‘open[s] up a pleasing, and pleasingly blurred, space between [Lerner’s] brainy but unsophisticated douchebag of a narrator and the authorial voice delivering him.’12
The current enthusiasm for autofiction speaks to an appetite for texts that dissolve the boundary between life and art, claiming a closeness to ‘truth’: this is what David Shields calls ‘reality hunger.’ He observes that, in response, an ‘artistic movement’ is ‘forming,’ with key components including: a ‘deliberate unartiness,’ ‘“raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional’; ‘plasticity of form’; ‘self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography’; and ‘a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.’13 Berlin, Babitz and Howland may have been ‘rediscovered’ now, in part, to satisfy that hunger, and this in turn may have informed the ways in which they have been read and analyzed. Many critics emphasize the apparently ‘authentic,’ or biographical aspects of their work – never mind that it was originally sold as ‘fiction’ – while overlooking the artfulness required to make a story feel like life. As Shields observes of the poems of Billy Collins, they ‘sound like they were tossed off in a couple of hours while he drank scotch and listened to jazz late at night,’ but of course they ‘weren’t; this is an illusion.’14 The same is true of the short stories of Berlin, Babitz and Howland.
As autofiction has grown in popularity, the term has proven useful for asking questions about the nature of fact and invention. Alex Hughes calls it ‘a monstrous production’ while for Shirley Jordan it is ‘a slippery hybrid.’15 This slipperiness is produced by the tension between the two halves of the term – the ‘auto,’ or nonfiction part, and the ‘fiction’ – which place it in a liminal space between genres, throwing the integrity of each into question. Autofiction asks whether nonfiction really tells the truth, and whether fiction is truly invented. Meanwhile, the term eludes precise definition, prompting discussions about the nature of writing. This may explain the abundance of critical takes on autofiction in French (the genre remains under-theorized in Anglophone criticism and with reference to Anglophone texts). As Jean-Louis Jeannelle writes, ‘[a]utofiction may have become this formidable theoretical catalyst precisely because of the fog that surrounds it: writers, critics and academics find in it a space of mutual understanding, or rather misunderstanding, but productive misunderstanding.’16 Autofiction’s theoretical flexibility is its strength: it can be different things to different people, serving ‘many different purposes,’ to quote Rosie MacLachlan.17
A Question of Length – Or, Shortness
Despite this supposed flexibility, autofiction remains almost exclusively associated with long form works. Zadie Smith articulated consumers’ hunger for more and more, longer and longer autofictional works when she said that she ‘needed’ the next installment of My Struggle ‘like crack.’18 Luckily, Knausgård has an ‘artistic commitment to inexhaustibility,’ to quote Wood again, which means ‘notic[ing] everything – too much, no doubt’ – and he writes it all down. Wood seems to operate on the assumption that the longer and more detailed an autofiction, the more convincingly it replicates reality. Meanwhile, length facilitates a kind of shapelessness. Autofictions are praised as ‘purposefully unartful,’ and therefore able to ‘smuggle more reality into them than polished works,’ because ‘unartful art’ is ‘more like life than artful art.’19 Another autofictional doorstopper is Megan Boyle’s enormous Liveblog, which began online, in real time, and was eventually printed as a seven-hundred-page book.20 Doris and Andreea Mironescu have coined the term ‘maximalist autofictions’ for tomes at this end of the extreme, whose length might begin as an ‘expression of canonical ambition from the part of the authors,’ but often ends up ‘providing a fine terrain for literary experiment.’21 Mark McGurl categorizes My Struggle and Liveblog as works of ‘monumental minimalism,’ which ‘stretch[es] autofiction out’ to ‘epic’ proportions.22
Where in all this is the short form? It is seldom included in discussions of autofiction, which McGurl sees as preferring ‘a small world to a sprawling one,’ condensing ‘a great deal of symbolic struggle into protagonist names and pronouns.’23 In his view, autofiction ‘stretches out’ the apparently insignificant details of life, whereas the short story can often be seen as compressing significant events into a restricted word count. Nonetheless, autofiction lends itself to episodic units of prose, even within the maximalist form – flotsam and jetsam rolling on to the end of each ‘novel.’24 In Tope Folarin’s definition, it ‘jettisons traditional notions of plot’ but often features a ‘fragmented structure’; and for Elise Huguény-Leger, it ‘merges artistic mediums and narrative threads, creating fragmented texts,’ as in Camille Laurens’s Philippe, Christine Angot’s Incest and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Holiday in a Coma.25
Looking at the short works of Berlin, Babitz and Howland offers a new perspective on autofiction, one that challenges some of these ideas, in particular the assumption that ‘stretching things out’ is somehow more autofictional. Indeed, I’ll suggest that short autofictions allow authors to capture (and reimagine) particular elements of lived experience that do not translate so easily to the longer form.
This is perhaps because the short form draws attention to the ‘fiction’ half of autofiction, which is too often taken for granted in critical analyses of the genre. There is something inherently constructed about the short form, if only because the author must determine where to begin and end. This relies on a process of shaping, reshaping and polishing, which Knaugård decries, saying that after first novel was rejected by publishers, ‘I lost belief both in myself and in speed. I started to polish the car instead of driving it – and, obviously, when you polish your car, you don’t get anywhere, no matter how nice the car looks.’26 By the time he wrote, My Struggle, he was moving quickly again. But writers of short autofiction might counter that textual polishing serves a purpose. For instance, in Howland’s ‘How We Got the Old Woman to Go,’ Bette Lee approaches her grandmother’s coffin: a ‘long narrow blue box,’ the ‘raised cover padded in Styrofoam packing material,’ inside which is ‘another box,’ which is ‘shut.’27 Bette Lee sees that the ‘painted wooden lid’ shows ‘the figure of an old woman in a sunken blue bodice,’ and realizes ‘that this was supposed to be my grandmother […] that this was my grandmother.’ This may be ‘true’ but it is not ‘unartful.’ It might also be a metaphor for the autofictional short story: a self-contained ‘box’ within the open ‘box’ of a collection, anthology, journal or magazine.
Of course, the supposedly formless autofictional novel belies its own shaping and polishing. Gavin Thomson observes that even ‘an ostensibly messy novel like How Should a Person Be? is meticulously shaped,’ noting that Heti took seven years to write it; and David S. Wallace argues that before the rapid publications of the My Struggle series, Knausgård had ‘in fact, already done the mental work of constructing narrative’ because ‘memory can’t help but form stories.’ So perhaps is in fact no more consciously crafted than novel-length autofictions – on the contrary, it may be that in its brief, explicit artfulness, it is simply more transparent, more honest, about the ‘fiction’ part of the equation. We could even say that short autofictions practice a more ‘radical openness,’ as Rothman would have it, than novel-length texts.
The story’s episodic structure foregrounds the provisionality of life in short autofiction, and is particularly suited to the representation of loss. Lydia Davis describes fragmentary texts as ‘the most credible expression of grief,’ adding that in the ‘silences’ between them, ‘the grief is alive.’28 Collections of autofictional stories leave room for these silences, holding space for the inexpressible. In ‘those white spaces, I grieve,’ writes Ysabelle Cheung, and ‘all the while, my words come out in fits and starts, as fragments: discontinuous, incomplete, rootless.’29 She notes that pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong ‘are increasingly turning to poetry, and sometimes, fiction, in Cantonese and English’ because these ‘fragments bring us closer to the emotion of ongoing reality’ in a time of loss and disorientation.30 Whereas novels ‘flow,’ short autofictions challenge the assumption that humans experience life as a continuous narrative. Galen Strawson has confronted the ‘widespread agreement’ that we ‘typically see or live’ a ‘narrative or story of some sort.’31 He suggests instead that there are ‘deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative,’ and argues that many of us are naturally more ‘Episodic’ in our perception of time, meaning that we do not understand ourselves ‘as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future.’32 Short stories writers tend to be more ‘Episodic’: Norman Friedman proposed as early as 1958 that the episode is the ‘commonly found size in the short story,’ building on Elder Olson’s theory of ‘episodes’ comprised of ‘scenes.’33 Loss is distilled in the gaps between them.
Shortness also changes autofiction by facilitating the writing of outsider-insider characters: Babitz’s and Howland’s protagonists are almost always writers, while Berlin’s occupy liminal roles because of their geographical transience. Jordan Kisner describes ‘the alienation of the character who resembles Berlin’ in each story: she ‘is typically isolated from friends, at odds with a love interest, cast out of polite society, or geographically in the middle of nowhere.’34 And of course, the short form is liminal. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann explain that, due to ‘its very brevity and episodic structure, the generic liminality of the short story privileges the depiction of transitional situations and moments of crisis or decision.’35 Moreover, liminality pervades the form itself, which is defined by in-between spaces – for example, the boundaries between stories in a single anthology, journal or magazine. The same could be said of an individual writer’s collection of short autofiction: adjoining stories are simultaneously connected and divided by ‘thresholds,’ components of what Gérard Genette calls the ‘paratext’ of a book: the ‘literary and painterly conventions that mediate between the world of publishing and the world of the text’; that is, between the ‘real’ world and that created in each autofictional story.36
Short autofiction allows writers to capture a fragmentary sense of self – particularly when presented within a collection. Here, the onomastic links between stories imply a ‘larger whole’ linking back to their author’s life. Meanwhile, the process of writing an autofictional text requires the author to separate from their autofictional double while remaining onomastically connected to them. The split can never be complete because every time the autofictional double breaks free, their name or biography pulls them back to their creator, and the process of separation must start anew. Using images from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots, Emmanuel Samé argues that the autobiographical tendency is ‘to make a statue of yourself’ whereas the autofictional tendency ‘is to project yourself out of yourself,’ causing a tear or rupture.37 He adds that writers of autofiction not only refuse to make a statue of themselves but commit to ‘ruining it systematically.’38 Short autofiction is suited to this repeated fragmentation because the smallest unit of meaning here is the story, and each story demands a fresh rupture.
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| Bette Howland |
Howland’s short autofictions, first published in Blue in Chicago, demonstrate how brevity brings out the explicitly constructed aspects of the genre. Howland had previously published a memoir, and she ‘demurred about what to call’ her collection.39 Lucy Scholes writes that
[t]he pieces that depict urban life offer us some of the best and most evocative writing in this impressive collection. I call them “pieces” pointedly: since Howland had gone to “a hell of a lot of trouble – no one will ever know how much – to work with the facts”, she didn’t want them reviewed as fiction.40
And yet Harper & Row marketed them as short stories. Roslyn Rosen Lund recounts an interview with Howland in which she ‘reminded her that her book has been called “nonfiction,” “a series of sketches,” “an autobiography,”’ and Howland countered ‘that it has also been called “a short story collection,” “a first-class novel,” “a chronicle”’ – before shrugging and saying that she was ‘not concerned with labels.’41 Later, Howland clarified that ‘when people worry about whether something is fiction or non-fiction, they are worrying about how much invention there is,’ when they ‘should be worrying about how much imagination there is.’42 She wanted her readers to focus on the craft, or artistry: in short, on the writing.
‘She’s not sick […] She’s just broken,’ observes Howland’s narrator of her grandmother in ‘How They Got the Old Woman to Go’: a rupture echoed by the form of the collection, which is fragmented, with characters and events split across multiple autofictions.43 Many characters appear several times: Bette Lee’s father Sam, her mother Jess, her sister Slim and uncle Rudy. They all share names with their real-life counterparts – Howland’s parents really were called Sam and Jess. Here, I will focus on the seventh and ninth stories in the collection, ‘How We Got the Old Woman to Go’ and ‘Power Failure.’ The former is the tale of the narrator’s grandmother’s death and funeral, and her family’s complicated feelings as they mourn her; and the latter follows a very similar narrator’s attempts to write.
Howland’s short autofictions are profoundly interested in liminal spaces. In ‘Power Failure,’ her writer-narrator is alone in a house in which ‘the power’ is ‘out; one of those freak spring storms that bump off trees and knock down lines’: a classic locus for the short story.44 Already, it is clear that she is living in an uncanny world where domestic space is transformed by the lack of electricity, while the outside world is unfamiliar, blanketed with snow. This sets the tone for the texts that follow, which also seem to lie at an angle to reality. The narrator chronicles her dreams: ‘I get discouraged myself, when people start talking about dreams,’ she admits, ‘[e]specially in stories.’45 She adds, however, that ‘[t]his isn’t really a story – and I was dreaming. And I’d just like to see if I can get things straight.’46
Throughout ‘Power Failure,’ dreams act as a metaphor for writing, adjacent to it but distinct from it, recalling fiction’s relationship to life. ‘You know how it is when you try to recover a dream,’ says the narrator.47
A tug on the line; a quiver, a gleam. You grab hold, you hang on; it struggles and squirms. […] That’s how it is in my dream, only the other way around. In my dream I’m trying to recall real life, waking life. My own life. I have it, it’s hooked, I’m reeling it in. […] A wriggle, a flash, it slips from my grasp.48
Howland questions the primacy of the real over the imagined here: it is the former, for her narrator, that is elusive and difficult to hold onto. She lives in the realm of the dream – or of the story, or not-really-story, which occupies a similar space, near the real but not exactly in it. Later on, the narrator declares that ‘I know this is a dream. Only a dream,’ and it is unclear whether she is referring to the dream she is describing or to the story itself.49 The culmination of this train of thought comes when she dreams about her daughter. Howland had two sons and no daughters, and in the end her narrator realizes that she, too, has no daughter. ‘I’m awake,’ she says, ‘And what do I do now? I never had a daughter.’50 We are thrown back into the realm of the autobiographical.
Howland’s generic innovations also allow her short autofictions to explore family interactions, in which truths are often transformed or obscured. In ‘How We Got the Old Woman to Go,’ Bette Lee’s exchanges with family members act as a commentary on genre. ‘It still scares me to hear my mother cry,’ she confides, ‘the way it used to whenever she started talking Yiddish,’ because ‘I didn’t understand and wasn’t meant to’ – Howland gives voice to the fragmented and shifting identities that belong to different spheres of life, and the fictionalizations that occur as we move between these.51 For her, the self is firmly ‘Episodic.’ When the narrator’s mother tells that she doesn’t need to attend her grandmother’s funeral, it was ‘[h]ard to tell what this meant’ because ‘after all these years I still don’t speak her language.’52 Howland repeatedly presents people saying the opposite of what they mean, demonstrating that the who they are in an intimate family context is not their entire self, or is a different version to the self performed for the wider world.
Throughout Blue in Chicago, Howland explores the nature of the real. When a hospital technician asks how long the grandmother has been ‘senile’ for in ‘How We Got the Old Woman to Go,’ the narrator’s mother reacts strongly – ‘My mother was never senile. She’s sharp as a tack’53 – and what bothers her most is that the technician will never ‘know my mother’ because she has faded away to an altered version of herself.54 Howland’s short autofictions capture the oblique ways in which we come to know, or not know, one another. Whether we are ill or well, we can never achieve complete mutual understanding, because we are not transparently truthful about ourselves, even when we try to be. Hence, perhaps, why the family are prepared to accept the grandmother’s blurring of fact and fiction, life and fantasy. ‘You should talk to her. Orient her to reality,’ says the technician, and the narrator’s uncle responds, ‘Oh, reality […] Ha. Uh-huh. I see. Reality.’55 Moments like these undermine the assumed primacy of the real.
Blue in Chicago reveals autofictional short stories – or, we might say, the auto-story – as an unstable form, whose boundaries are only ever provisional: you might try to ‘contain’ it, but it is already decaying, transforming within its ‘box,’ like the grandmother’s corpse.56
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| Lucia Berlin |
Beginning with ‘Angels Laundromat’ – and throughout Berlin’s later short stories, as we shall see – the contrasts between autofictions about similar but not identical events accentuate the fictional qualities of her work. Like many autofictional writers, she allows herself
to reverse dates, to “forget” “true” elements, to interfere with the truth. One thread is pulled from the wool ball of life. And this thread is woven into others, who come from elsewhere and, tapering, take more space, like a cobweb in which the reader can get caught and which, in the case of a good autofiction, s/he will not escape unscathed.57
Shortness of form draws out these multiple autofictional narrative threads: Berlin places narratives in opposition to one another while entwining them in her overarching body of work, which takes on its own sort of life. This is a device used in other short fiction collections, such as Susan Minot’s Lust, Charles Baxter’s Believers, and perhaps above all Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams, which, as Kasia Boddy points out, ‘rearranges the protagonist’s life in various combination or, as she puts it, “parallel universes.”’58 Berlin, too, creates ‘parallel universes’ across her many stories and indeed collections.
After its publication in The Atlantic, ‘Angels Laundromat’ appeared in Berlin’s first collection Angels Laundromat in 1981 – but this ‘Luchia’ is not the only autofictional narrator in the book. ‘The Musical Vanity Boxes’ opens with a child in El Paso, Texas stamping a metal pendant with her name, or a version of her name: ‘I wrote LUCHA and hung it around my neck.’59 Later, she and her friend Hope go to the Gavilán Cafe in Juarez, where she gives the waiter ‘the name the Syrians called me … Luchaha. Not Lucía or Lucha but Lu-Cha-a.’60 It is telling that in an earlier incarnation of this story the character’s name did not cleave so closely to Berlin’s. When ‘The Musical Vanity Boxes’ originally appeared in the magazine Wild Dog in 1965, ‘Hope said Shahala and I said Rashahela.’61 The narrator’s real name is never specified, so her identity remains separate from Berlin’s – this version of the story is more about her closeness to Hope, or Shahala, than her closeness to the author.
From the mid-1970s onwards, however, Berlin started to consciously create overlaps between stories, and between fiction and reality, with characters’ names matching or nearly matching one another’s or her own. The near-match in the most interesting, in that it draws attention not only to the ‘auto’ part of Berlin’s project – the roots of her fiction in her life – but also to the skill, or craft, she uses to distort these experiences. Consider ‘La Barca de la Ilusión,’ first published in the magazine Rolling Stock in 1990, and ‘The Wives,’ which first appeared in Berlin’s 1999 collection Where I Live Now. Set in Yelapa, Mexico in the mid-1960s, ‘La Barca de la Ilusión’ is structured around two acts of violence. First, the protagonist stabs her husband’s heroin dealer ‘in the stomach with a paring knife.’62 The heroin dealer lives – but later, after shooting up with her husband, he stumbles into an open fire. The protagonist jumps at this opportunity, ‘grab[bing]’ the dealer and ‘beat[ing] his head into the sand’ until he dies.63 On the other hand, in Berlin’s 1999 story ‘The Wives,’ near-identical characters in the same place arrive at a different outcome. ‘I once stabbed [my husband’s heroin] connection, in Yelapa,’ says this story’s protagonist, but ‘I didn’t even hurt him, really’.64 There is no second, fatal act of violence.
Sometimes Berlin’s retellings of similar incidents diverge across more than two stories, splitting the truth even further – which becomes clear in the context of her wider oeuvre. For instance, ‘Dr HA Moynihan,’ which first appeared in American Bystander in 1982, begins: ‘I hated St. Joseph’s. Terrified by the nuns, I struck Sister Cecilia one hot Texas day and was expelled.’65 ‘Stars and Saints,’ which appeared in Berlin’s 1990 collection Homesick, is also set at a school called St Joseph’s, but is narrated by a child who ‘love[s] the kitchen, the soft laughter and murmurs of the nun-cooks.’66 She accidentally knocks into Sister Cecilia during a tearful moment, but is ‘sent home that same day, expelled from St Joseph’s for striking a nun. I don’t know how she could have thought that I would hit her. It wasn’t like that at all.’67 And finally, Berlin’s 1998 story ‘Silence,’ which first appeared in Fourteen Hills Journal, returns to the same school. ‘I ended up at St Joseph’s,’ says the narrator, ‘which I loved.’68 Her life at home is difficult, however, leading Sister Cecilia to try to ‘pray with [her] in the cloakroom,’ where she ‘[gets] scared and pushe[s] her and she [falls] down.’69 The narrator is then expelled. The ‘truth’ presented by this third story hovers somewhere between the contrasting truths of ‘Dr HA Moynihan,’ in which the child hits Sister Cecilia, and ‘Stars and Saints,’ in which she is absolved.
When these stories are read together, discrepancies between otherwise identical characters, places and situations emerge and call attention to the fallibility of representation and of memory. In a 2019 interview, Berlin’s son David Berlin told me that, as a child, he became frustrated with his mother’s stories about boys who were clearly based on him.
She’d say, Oh, it’s just a story, it’s not really you. And I’m like, Yeah, a story about everything I did and said, but you [renamed] me Joel. And she goes, Well, what name would you like? And I’m like, Darius. Which I thought was […] a man’s name.
This anecdote is sweet and funny. It is also revealing about Berlin: she seems to have valued the ways in which her fiction differed from reality above the ways in which it resembled it. What mattered to her was difference, as opposed to similarity: the gaps between life and art.
The short form is what allows Berlin to experiment with different versions of events and different perspectives. This suggests that she may have seen writing as a process of investigation, or as a probing toward meaning, rather than as the experience of objective truth. In her memoir Welcome Home, she describes her years in Helena, Montana, over the winter of 1940 – the period she remembers as when she learned to read.70 Every Saturday, she and her father brought supplies to a prospector named Johnson, up in the mountains. These supplies included magazines. ‘I carefully tore out pages […] and glued them onto the walls’71:
The idea was to have a tight patchwork of pages all over the cabin, from floor to ceiling. All through the dark days of winter Johnson would read the walls. When he had finished all of the walls he’d paste new pages over the old ones. It was important to mix up the pages and magazines, so that page 20 might be high on a north wall and 21 on the bottom of the south wall.72
We can read this patchwork as a legend for Berlin’s own writing. Like Johnson, she spent years piecing together moments and encounters, reworking and reordering them: her stories’ shortness enables this. Instead of weaving the threads of her experience into one coherent whole, she chooses to preserve them as moments which stand in juxtaposition to one another.
The reader who approaches Berlin’s short pieces as fiction can enjoy the overlaps and discrepancies between them. The reader who approaches them for a clear sense of biography will, however, be frustrated. Throughout her oeuvre, Berlin’s short autofictions make her real life more difficult to discern, as her lived experiences slip away between alternate retellings of events. She may not have been trying to capture her experience at all in her fiction. On the contrary, each of her conflicting versions of characters and events destabilizes the others’ claims to authenticity. Berlin’s short autofictions do not seek to preserve her experience, but to allow it to be forgotten. For instance, we will never know whether she had a violent encounter with her husband’s drug dealer in Yelapa, because the variation between ‘La Barca de la Ilusión’ and ‘The Wives’ allows the fiction to take precedence over the fact. Her son Mark Berlin wrote that his own memories ‘have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.’73 This is why it is so difficult to reduce Berlin’s work to her biography: because, in Mark’s words, it is impossible to discern what ‘really happened.’ With Berlin, it is the story, or rather the stories, that endure.
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| Eve Babitz |
In Slow Days, Fast Company, Babitz rebels against many conventions of form and genre. Although her book carries the subheading The World, The Flesh and LA: Tales, and was marketed as fiction by Knopf-Random House, it disrupts the shape of the classic short story collection.74 The ten autofictions within it are interspersed with notes to the reader – and not to any reader, but to a specific reader, a man with whom the narrator is in love. The shortness of each textual component permits the intervention of these notes. The one before the first story, ‘Slow Days,’ reads, ‘Darling: I know you don’t care about the art of the novel but you might like the part about Forest Lawn.’75 Babitz’s arch flirtatiousness here engages us while also reminding us that we are not the only person to whom the narrator directs her text – so with each division between her autofictions, Babitz also divides us from her narrator’s intended audience. Her process is as much about ripping things up as it is about creating something new.
Autofiction is a label – with Doubrovsky specifying that for a work to be autofictional it must be defined as a novel – and Babitz was always keen to subvert labels. Of her first published story ‘The Sheik,’ she insisted that ‘I thought it was an essay, but Rolling Stone saw it as fiction, and that was fine with me.’76 Her flippant tone here belies a considered artistic agenda: she may be saying that she doesn’t care whether her work is read as fiction or nonfiction, but this itself is groundbreaking. She also said that ‘[e]verything I wrote was memoir or essay or whatever you want to call it. It was one hundred percent nonfiction. I just changed the names.’77 Her rebellious spirit is evident in the fact that she thinks that a text in which the names are changed can remain straightforward nonfiction.
Babitz’s cavalier approach to the boundaries of genre may have been inspired by her literary context. In the 1970s, her social circle was thrilled by the rise of New Journalism, ‘often characterised by reporters writing themselves into their stories in order to provide a fuller and more vivid account of events.’78 This was exemplified by Babitz’s good friend Joan Didion, a New Journalist pioneer who engineered the publication of ‘The Sheik’: Grover Lewis, the editor of Rolling Stone, had asked her to write for him, but she ‘couldn’t because of her contract with Life’ – so she recommended Babitz, who was familiar with New Journalism’s conventions.79 Indeed, Babitz uses her autofictional narrators as nets to capture places (Ports restaurant, the Blackboard restaurant, Palm Springs) while acknowledging subjective bias, as a New Journalist would. Tom Wolfe listed four key devices of the genre, the last of which involves ‘the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house,’ and so forth.80 Although Babitz’s autofictions are short, they are comprehensive, taking the time to touch and name the many components of everyday life in LA.
The narrator’s notes to her absent lover in Slow Days, Fast Company emphasize the collection’s theatricality. The note before ‘Bad Day at Palm Springs’ ends: ‘Albee probably could have made something out of the ghastly assortment of people,’ but ‘I would rather not think about theatrical possibilities, no matter how suitable that place would have been as a stage.’81 By making reference to a playwright, Babitz winks knowingly at her reader; and by having her narrator say that she would ‘rather not think’ about the fictionalization of the events that follow for the stage, she sidesteps the fact that they have already been fictionalized for the page. During the story itself, she finally gives the beloved a name, Shawn, as well as biographical details that map him onto Paul Ruscha, Babitz’s lover during the late 1970s.82 And yet the love notes reminds us that we, Babitz’s readers, differ from Shawn in that we are real, whereas he is Babitz’s creation, however Ruscha-esque he may appear. This split reminds us of the divide between the real (our world) and the fictional (Shawn’s world). It also evidences Babitz’s willingness to meld and mix up the two.
One of the peculiarities of autofiction is its talent for opposition, which can be traced to Doubrovsky’s first use of the term. He wrote Fils in response to literary theorist Philippe Lejeune’s claims about the pact between writer and reader in autobiography: that autobiography relies, firstly, on the onomastic link between writer and the narrative ‘I,’ and secondly, on an implied promise that this ‘I’ will tell the truth. Doubrovsky’s autofiction is a novel-length ‘what if’ retaining Lejeune’s onomastic pact and commitment to truthfulness, but imbuing this with all the imaginative possibilities at his disposal. Doubrovsky himself explained that while writing Fils he was ‘hit by the realisation’ that he was undertaking ‘an impossibility.’83 His project emerges from a sort of formal rebelliousness: it is an attempt ‘to evade the particularly stringent and exclusive social norms within which traditional autobiography was constrained.’84 A similar motivation lies behind Slow Days, Fast Company, which seeks to capture a man and a city, Los Angeles, that continually evade the narrator, and perhaps the author. It is an articulation of both belonging and longing.
Babitz’s decision to structure the collection around these love notes places her narrator always in relation to someone else – the absent lover – just as fact, fiction and autofiction, and the short story and novel, are defined in with each other in mind. Like Howland in her explorations of shifting identities within and between family members, Babitz’s narrator’s identity is fundamentally relational, reminding her readers that her words are (apparently) directed at a very specific audience, and that this audience is not us. In the prologue that comes before the first story and love note, the narrator introduces the concept of what follows:
Since it’s impossible to get this [man] I’m in love with to read anything unless it’s about or to him, I’m going to riddle this book with Easter Egg italics so that this time it won’t take him two and half years to read my book like it did the first one.85
The narrator’s admission of her strategy sets us up to suspend our disbelief and read her short stories, or ‘tales,’ as true. It sets the tone for Babitz’s autofictional blurring: ‘if you’re reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he’ll read it,’ because ‘it’s a shame to let it all go for one person.’86 The private and the public collapse, spilling into each other, as they do in all autofictional writing.
Conclusion
Howland, Babitz and Berlin demonstrate that brevity contributes to, and brings out, the ‘fiction’ in autofiction, by highlighting what is invented through fragmentations and boundaries between stories (as in Howland), ‘clashes’ within a collection or larger body of work (as in Berlin), or asides that interrogate the surrounding stories’ relationships to reality (as in Babitz). Their choices of the short form are driven by a shared desire to occlude as well as reveal, to achieve transparency and opacity simultaneously. The three writers’ impulses come from different places, however: Howland sought to convey the miscommunications that mediate human relationships, meaning that we can never fully share one reality, one truth; Berlin sought to transform her lived experiences on the page, reworking her memories in divergent short stories, and thus slipping away from easy definition; and Howland sought to undermine genre itself, and did, by refusing familiar literary labels or categories. In the process, all three women drew attention to the artfulness – the originality, intentionality and skillfulness – of their writing. To quote Geoff Dyer, quoted by Shields in Reality Hunger, ‘I like to write stuff that’s only an inch from life, from what really happened, but all the art is of course in that inch.’87
In addition, it seems likely that Howland, Berlin and Babitz wrote in order to escape reductive biographical readings. It is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction with a form that is built around leaving things out, and it is also difficult to sift the truth from multiple, overlapping or clashing versions of events. As Geoffrey W. Gust puts it, ‘the concept of autofiction signifies that critics cannot hope to somehow recover “the facts” about an author’s life by reading his/her literary works’ because it ‘explicitly denotes a “story of the self” and highlights the fact that first-person narration is necessarily contrived.’88 Thus, Babitz, Berlin and Howland not only use autofiction to defend their creative freedom, but also to turn a critical eye on both fiction and nonfiction as forms – and in the process, they propose a fresh approach not only to text but also to self.
These three writers’ innovations in the short form, moreover, suggest that ‘autofiction’ may not be as useful a term as it initially appears. In the end, MacLachlan’s assertion that its theoretical flexibility is its strength is disproven by the extent to which critical discussions of Howland’s Berlin’s and Babitz’s work have obscured the fictional aspects of their writing, distracting from their choices as artists.89 The subheading of The Observer’s review of A Manual for Cleaning Women is representative – ‘Lucia Berlin’s short stories have an undeniable air of authenticity’90 – and Babitz and Howland have been given similar treatment. So perhaps we may conclude that autofiction’s theoretical flexibility is, in fact, a weakness. It may be time to propose a new definition of the term: one which takes into account the questions posed by short autofictions – or indeed auto-stories – as well as much longer works.
Notes
1. The apparently misspelled ‘Angels Laundromat’ is an instance in which Berlin drew from life verbatim: the classified pages of The Albuquerque Journal advertise an ‘Angels Laundromat’ [sic] at 4301 4th North-West in 1967, which Berlin used during her years in Albuquerque (The Albuquerque Journal, February 23, 1967, 30).
2. Berlin, “Angels Laundromat” 92–94.
3. Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company, 13. Babitz’s narrators remain unnamed, but she heavily implies that they share her “I”. For Philippe Vilain, the lack of an explicit onomastic connection does not prevent a work from being autofictional: he argues that Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, for example, ‘interrogates autofiction anew on the question of homonymat’ as ‘the author pretends to tell the story of her life in the first person in her text, without naming herself’ (Vilain, L’Autofiction En Théorie, 58, my translation).
4. Howland, Blue in Chicago, 138.
5. Read, “How Lucia Berlin Became a Literary Superstar 11 Years After Her Death”; Sarazen, “With Love and Squalor”; Genzlinger, “Bette Howland, Author and Protégée of Bellow’s, Dies at 80”.
6. Howland, 326.
7. Quoted in Worthington, The Story of ‘Me’, 5.
8. In fact, autofiction emerged at a surprising time in the history of thought. Rosie MacLachlan observes that the possibility of an embodied person committing to an accurate representation of themselves through language ‘runs counter to post-structuralist notions of the self as produced through – and contemporaneously with – language’ (MacLachlan, Nina Bouraoui, Autofiction and the Search for Selfhood, 7). It finds theoretical grounding more in midcentury psychoanalysis than in the sociological thought of the era in which it emerged. Autofiction has repeatedly been described as ‘a post-Freudian phenomenon’ which allows for the self to be multiple and fragmented, and that comprehends and perhaps even celebrates ‘the elusiveness of what constitutes the “self”,’ as well as an ‘inchoate mix of perceived reality, fantasy, desire, and repression’ (Heidenrich, Literary Impostors, 14).
9. For instance, Siddharth Srikanth asserts that ‘the onomastic correspondence between author, narrator, and a character in a literary work subtitled or otherwise marketed and received as fiction constitutes autofiction’ (Srikanth, “Fictionality and Autofiction”.
10. Keeler, “Autofiction Grows Up, A Little”.
11. Thomson, “More Life: On Contemporary Autofiction and the Scourge of Relatability’”.
12. Thessaly La Force, ‘Sheila Heti on “How Should a Person Be?”’, The Paris Review, June 18, 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/06/18/sheila-heti-on-how-should-a-person-be/; Toby Lichtig, ‘Manspreading: The Sociopolitics of Ben Lerner’s Autofiction’, The Times Literary Supplement, 2019, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/manspreading-lerner-autofiction/.
13. David Shields, Reality Hunger (London, UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2011), 13.
14. Shields, 12–13.
15. Alex Hughes, ‘Recycling and Repetition in Recent French “Autofiction”: Marc Weitzmann’s Doubrovskian Borrowings’, The Modern Language Review, 97, no. 3 (2002): 566–576 (567); Shirley Jordan, ‘Etat Present: Autofiction in the Feminine’, French Studies, 67, no. 1 (2012): 76–84 (76).
16. Quoted in Vilain, 7 (my translation).
17. MacLachlan, 159.
18. Ben Lerner, ‘Each Cornflake’, The London Review of Books, 36, no. 10, May 22, 2014, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n10/ben-lerner/each-cornflake.
19. Thomson.
20. Indeed, Boyle’s Twitter account made a claim for its closeness to life from 2011 to 2015, through the author’s use of the bold handle @boyleunedited (‘NASA’, ‘Keeping It Real – Or Whatever – With Megan Boyle’, Alt Citizen, 2013, http://altcitizen.com/keeping-it-real-or-whatever-with-megan-boyle/).
21. Doris Mironescu and Andreea Mironescu, ‘Maximalist Autofiction, Surrealism and Late Socialism in Micea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid’, The European Journal of Life Writing, 10 (2021): 66–87 (73).
22. Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (New York, NY: Verso, 2021), 206.
23. Ibid., 214.
24. For instance, Mitch Therieau writes that ‘these distressed texts nonetheless sketch one path forward for the novel’, conflating autofiction (even distressed, fragmented autofiction) and the long form in one breath (Mitch Therieau, ‘The Acid-Washed Novel’, Post45, July 20, 2021, https://post45.org/2021/07/the-acid-washed-novel/).
25. Tope Folarin, ‘Can a Black Novelist Write Autofiction? Why the Hottest Literary Trend of the Last Decade Is So Blindingly White’, The New Republic, October 27, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/159951/can-black-novelist-write-autofiction; Elise Hugueny-Léger ‘Broadcasting the Self: Autofiction, Television and Representations of Authorship in Contemporary French Literature’, Life Writing, 14, no. 1 (2017): 5–18 (5).
26. Joshua Rothman, ‘Knausgård’s Selflessness’, The New Yorker, April 20, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/knausgaards-selflessness.
27. Howland, 142.
28. Ysabelle Cheung, ‘What Happens to Writing When We Stop Pretending Anything Makes Sense?: Ysabelle Cheung on Coronavirus, Hong Kong, and Fragmentation’, LitHub, March 16, 2020, https://lithub.com/what-happens-to-writing-when-we-stop-pretending-anything-makes-sense/.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Galen Strawson, ‘Against Narrativity’, Ratio, 17 (2004): 428–52 (429).
32. Ibid., 430.
33. Norman Friedman, ‘What Makes a Short Story Short?’, Modern Fiction Studies, 4, no. 2 (1958): 103–117 (108).
34. Jordan Kisner, ‘Lucia Berlin’s Harrowing, Radiant Fiction’, The Atlantic, December 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/lucia-berlin-welcome-home/573934/.
35. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann, ‘Preface’, in Liminality and the Short Story, ed. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/books/9781315817040, i.
36. Richard Macksey, ‘Foreword’, in Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xvii.
37. Emmanuel Samé, Autofiction Père & Fils: S. Doubrovsky, A. Robbe-Grillet, H. Guibert (Dijon, France: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2013), 10 (my translation).
38. Ibid., 50 (my translation).
39. Daniel Lewis, ‘Bette Howland: Blue in Chicago Review: The City on Trial, with the Writer as Witness’, July 7, 2020, https://theartsdesk.com/books/bette-howland-blue-chicago-review-%E2%80%93-city-trial-writer-witness.
40. Lucy Scholes, ‘Not Paris, London or New York: Bette Howland’s Chicago’, The Times Literary Supplement, 2020, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/blue-in-chicago-bette-howland-review-lucy-scholes/.
41. Howland, 128.
42. Ibid., 129.
43. Ibid., 138.
44. Ibid., 179. Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story ‘A Temporary Matter’ is set in strikingly similar circumstances. During a scheduled neighborhood power outage, the protagonists find that ‘[s]omething happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again’; indeed, ‘[a]ll day Shukumar had looked forward to the lights going out’ (Jhumpa Lahiri, ‘A Temporary Matter’, in Interpreter of Maladies, London, UK: Flamingo, 1999, 1–22).
45. Howland, 181.
46. Ibid., 181.
47. Ibid., 182.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 185.
50. Ibid., 186.
51. Ibid., 135.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 151.
54. Ibid., 152.
55. Ibid., 153.
56. In one of very few existing articles on short autofiction, Anne Malena quotes the rubric in the History of European Literature, which claims that ‘of all short forms of literature,’ the story is ‘the most difficult genre to define’ because ‘the function assigned to it has changed considerably over the centuries. Malena herself observes that the ‘genres of autobiography and short story have always shown themselves to be problematic primarily because they are difficult to define on their own terms, with autobiography always bordering on fiction and the short story forever paling in comparison to the novel’ (Anne Malena, ‘Playing with Genre in Condé’s Autofiction’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 12, no. 1/2, 2004: 154–169, 154).
57. Kerstin W Shands, Giulia Grillo Mikrut, Dipti Pattanaik and Karen Ferreira-Meyers, eds., Writing the Self: Essays on Autobiography and Autofiction (Stockholm, Sweden: Södertörns Högskola, 2015), 215.
58. Kasia Boddy, The American Short Story Since 1950 (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 122.
59. Berlin, Angels Laundromat, 9.
60. Ibid., 24.
61. Berlin, ‘From The Peaceable Kingdom’, Wild Dog (July 1965): 12–22 (20).
62. Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 150.
63. Ibid., 153.
64. Ibid., 178.
65. Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women (London, UK: Picador, 2015), 9.
66. Ibid., 20.
67. Ibid., 25.
68. Ibid., 321.
69. Ibid.
70. Berlin, Welcome Home, (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 12.
71. Ibid., 14.
72. Ibid.
73. Quoted in Lydia Davis, ‘The Story Is the Thing: On Lucia Berlin’, The New Yorker, August 12, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-story-is-the-thing-on-lucia-berlin.
74. The word ‘Tales’ was removed from this subheading in the New York Review of Books reissue of Slow Days, Fast Company.
75. Babitz, 5.
76. Quoted in Sarazen.
77. Ibid.
78. Worthington, 20.
79. Lili Anolik, Hollywood’s Eve (London, UK: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 61.
80. Tom Wolfe, ‘Why They Aren’t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore: A Treatise on the Varieties of Realistic Experience’, Esquire, 1972, https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/money/a20703846/tom-wolfe-new-jounalism-american-novel-essay/.
81. Babitz, p. 95.
82. Anolik, p. 129.
83. E.H. Jones, ‘Autofiction: A Brief History of a Neologism’, in Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature, ed. by Richard Bradford (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 174–84 (176).
84. Jones, 176.
85. Babitz, 4.
86. Ibid.
87. Shields, p. 44.
88. Geoffrey W. Gust, Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 41.
89. MacLachlan, 159.
90. Anthony Cummins, ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin Review: Matter-of-Fact but Moving Short Stories’, The Observer, September 4, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/04/a-manual-for-cleaning-women-lucia-berlin-review-short-stories-carmen-mijito-emergency.
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