Introduction 3
Truth and Trust 20
Me and Not-Me: Dismissing Unity in Autobiographical Writing 62
The Vortex Effect and The Tissue of Time 98
Inventing the Road With Every Step 126
Conclusions 152
Appendix 158
References 187
An extensive exploration into autobiographical writing, combining practical analysis for creative nonfiction writers with criticism of key texts for students of literary studies
Micaela Maftei holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow's English Literature Department. She is based in Toronto, Canada, where she works as a freelance editor. She is co-editor, with Laura Tansley, of Determining Form: Creative Non-Fiction Journeys (2013).
An enlightening and superbly readable survey of the autobiography
genre and its claims to truth and honesty. I'll be recommending it
to my writing students, and to everyone else I know who's
interested in good writing and how it works.
*Sarah Bakewell, Visiting Lecturer at City University, London, UK,
and author of How to Live, or A life of Montaigne (2011), winner of
the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography*
In literature, questions can be general but the answers which are
useful and illuminating are always particular. The Fiction of
Autobiography engages familiar and unfamiliar twentieth- and
twenty-first-century texts, English and translated, with a keen
particularism: how do they make and remake the past? Maftei's own
attempts to write ‘from the life’, included here in a memorable
appendix from which the reader may choose to start, provoked the
questions, and this engaging essay takes place in a practitioner’s
intellectual and emotional back room, where she considers the
various paradoxical aspects of the things she and others try to
revive or re-invent from memory. The book is a wonderful dialogue
with her own work, her reading, her readers. It leaves us with
enabling questions and insights.
*Michael Schmidt, Professor of Creative Writing, University of
Glasgow and Writer in Residence at St John's College, University of
Cambridge, UK*
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