is rejecting autofiction

I think we can all agree that autofiction was the literature trend of the 2010s. Even if Chris Kraus herself rejects the term, she is somewhat of a stylist within the field. Her debut novel I Love Dick was first published in 1997. At the time, it wasn’t very well received, rather the opposite, but in time the book grew to become a feminist cult classic and literary muse by being embarrassingly unveiling, its clumsy hybrid form weaving together obsessive love, gossip and art. Asking her why autofiction is the literary genre of my generation, she says it’s the most direct way to communicate and that the job of literature today is to be personal and niche. 

Chris [in a soft, calm voice from a bright room outside of LA]: Hi!

Nora: Hi! 

C: Wait one second, something is happening here. 

[Chris’ dog runs around in the background, making noise. She lets the dog out. The doorway becomes overexposed in Zoom when she opens the door. It looks like there is some kind of serene light shining in from the outside. In Berlin, where I am, it’s December and midnight. In other words: pitch dark, cold, depressing.]

C: I just needed to let her out in the yard. 

N: It looks really nice where you are. 

[Chris can’t really hear what I’m saying.]

C: Wait a minute, let me get settled.

N: It looks very nice where you are. You’re in LA, right?  

C: I’m actually outside of LA – I came away for the semester break to work on my new book. 

N: And how’s it going? 

C: It’s good. I have to finish it by the end of next year. 

N: So, it’s a long way to go still. 

C: It’s always a long process. 

N: You take a lot from your own life in your work, fictionalizing it in different ways in almost all your novels. At what point does real life become fiction to you? 

C: As soon as you write it. Because writing means composition, and composition means you are selecting some things, and leave out others. There is never any definitely true picture, there are only different combinations of incidents and facts. There is a great line in Nate Lippen’s new novel Ripcord, that will come out on Semiotext(e) in 2024 that really stuck with me: “There is no such thing as non-fiction”. As soon as you write anything you’re painting a picture or you’re telling a story. I became very aware of this when I wrote the Acker biography. 

N: Maybe it’s a stupid question, but when it comes to your early work, how much is reality and how much is made up? 

C: I have a really bad imagination, so very little in my books is made up. It’s more a matter of what’s left out, what’s included, how the story is told and from whose point of view the story is told. I’m certainly not the only person who works like that. Several writers, who’ve been really important to me, have made their books like that – Mary McCarthy, for example. She wrote wonderful and hilarious stories, and they’re all from her own life. And William S. Burroughs, and Alexander Churchy and back and back and on and on. Moby Dick! All literature, I think, all real literature tells the story of the writer, no matter how disguised it is or how many layers deep it goes. It’s really only genre fiction, that’s so dependent on plot, that doesn’t do this.

N: What’s your view of the term autofiction and the genre? 

C: I completely reject the term autofiction. [Chris laughs elegantly] I do! I don’t think it’s accurate, just as I don’t really believe that the distinction between non-fiction and fiction is all that accurate. I was re-reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood recently. Is it non-fiction? Hardly! He took the material and made it into a novel. 

N: I guess you can say that everything is “based on a true story”.

C: I think there is a big difference between and autofiction and memoir. All the contemporary writers whose work is described as autofiction, they’re telling these stories from their lives for a reason – there is a point beyond their own introspection, that’s driving them to write. It’s like their experience is a tool for seeing things in the world. Recording life in that way is maybe the most direct and accurate way of talking about things, as it’s close to how we actually experience the world. You know, there is very little interest in a person who writes a whole book to reprise their self-analysis. To be of interest it always has to be larger than one self, but on the other hand to be larger than one self, paradoxically, it has to be incredibly specific. The more specific you are about whatever dilemma you are describing, the more relatable it becomes. I was teaching an undergrad writing class last semester, and one of the mistakes that the students made was that, say, they go on and on about their love problems, but in the most general terms, instead of writing in terms of “he said this, and she said this, and this is what they wore, and this is where they went”. The more specific it is, the easier it gets for people to enter into your world. 

I don’t really believe that the distinction between non-fiction and fiction is all that accurate

N: What’s another thing you taught in writing class? 

C: Well, I always tell them to write scenes. The narrative is the backbone of something, but the scenes are everything else – the tissue, the organs. The scenes are really how things unfold. Writing a scene is like composing something; making a little movie for the reader. Even if you don’t come out and say directly what you’re thinking, and ideally you don’t, you depict things in a way that makes the reader think it’s herself thinking it. 

N: Young contemporary writers like describing their work as autofiction. Why do you think the genre is so trendy? 

C: Reading plays a different role in the culture now than it did 100 years ago – there is so many other things to do now, besides reading an old-fashioned novel. There used to be so many more novels published, because people would turn to novels for the entertainment that they now get from social media, gaming, streaming series or whatever. Therefore, I think the job of literature has become more niche and personal. Literature is still the medium that has the ability to communicate things from me to you. And you know, autofiction, or writing from the circumstances of one’s life becomes the most direct way to do this. Literature now is more and more a channel between writer and reader. 

N: I feel the style of autofiction reflects the way we are communicating with each other online, it’s a type of narrative form we’ve become very used to following. I can understand how it’s appealing for people who started writing on Twitter. 

C: Right! Or from blogging. A lot of contemporary writers started by blogging. 

N: And again, blogs and old Internet, feel very in right now. 

C: Now when Twitter has become so tainted, we have to go back to blogging! [Laughs again]

Literature now is more and more a channel between writer and reader

N: Is there a difference writing in first person and writing in third person, for you? 

C: I haven’t written in first person for a long time now. I kind of switched to third when I wrote my third novel Torpor. 

N: Third novel called for third person? [Here, I laugh a little. It was silly. Kind of a try-hard joke on my end.]

C: It’s because that novel was so much more personal than anything else I’ve ever written before. I really needed that mask of the characters to be able to say things in a more sensitive, truthful, embarrassing and revealing way. I don’t think I would have been able to go that far if I would have written it in first person. The novel that I’m writing now is basically about my family background and childhood, something that I’ve never written about before, but it’s written in the third person. 

N: So, by distancing yourself a bit from the text a bit you feel like you can write more freely? 

C: It’s easier to show what people call the unlikeable sides of a character, their contradictions. You know, people never add up and people are never consistent. People contradict themselves constantly. Somehow, it’s easier for me to show that and let that happen by writing in the third person than by writing in the first. 

N: I was reading on a forum online that the next big thing will be writing in first person plural. 

C: Oh right! I’m always discusted by people that say we, we, we. 

N: I think it means we only write manifestos from now on. Are you still political? 

C: I’m very interested in what happens in the world, how it happens and why it happens, and that’s kind of the definition of politics. I’m interested in how power is distributed. The book I’m writing on now, besides my family story, is about that. I spent over a year researching a murder in northern Minnesota that involved three teenagers who killed a fourth friend. They were all on methamphetamine. This led me to research this part of America that voted for Trump in 2016. The daily life of the people that live there is so uninvestigated. I really tried to understand something about the lives of these kids, who live in a small little town in the hinterlands of northern Minnesota and will never leave. If they leave it will be to go to another little town in the next state over. Interestingly, some of these kids, because they are a Scandinavian linage amongst some of the original people up there, are obsessed with sagas and Nordic mythologies. Some of them have Nordic runes tattooed on their arms. 

N: Strangely, in Sweden the Nordic mythologies have also been appropriated by far-right people. If you have a rune tattoo in Sweden, you’re either a fascist or an archeologist. 

C: These kids explained it to me in very simple way, which was that it was better to be something than to be nothing. There just looking for some little piece of identity that they can hold on to. 

N: Do you want to tell me more about your new book?

C: Me and my partner have a house up there, where I would always go to write in the summer. We’re in a cabin up in the woods, pretending that climate change isn’t happening, because there, nature is just so rich and untouched. But only 15 miles away in the towns around us, life looks completely different. I started looking into the crime records and met with these kids, I visited them in prison, I got to know their families and their friends and it was such a window into what life is like in a certain part of America. I related a lot to the girl in the crime, because she was this bright girl from a working-class background, just like I was. But what a difference half a century makes! It’s a very different psychic landscape these kids have grown up in, with the influence of Internet culture. And then there is the addiction part. I delt a lot with addiction in my own life though my partners. Within five years, three murders happened in this small town, and all of them involved methamphetamine. Meth makes people crazy. 

N: Why do you think people do so much meth in these parts of America? 

C: It’s cheap, it’s available and apparently sex on meth is incredible. It also gives you a sense that everything is happening when nothing is happening, it fills this big void. There is not a lot that these people can aspire to. Either you’re really churchy and preppy or part of this white underclass redneck culture. All this was really interesting, because I grew up in a place not quite as remote but similar, and if my family hadn’t left the US and moved to New Zeeland, I would’ve had a very different future. If we’d stayed there, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college.

people never add up and people are never consistent

N: I Love Dick has become a feminist cult classic. Throughout your work, you’ve been writing about the conditions for women in the arts. How has the cultural landscape changed for women since you wrote that first novel? 

C: There is definitely more female presence in the cultural world now than when I wrote I Love Dick. Absolutely no doubt. I think in the art world though, it’s still traditional white male artists who tend to be blue chip. The whole situation is so much less abject than it was in the mid-90s when I wrote that book, but other questions still come into play. I wonder if the wide spread acceptance of feminism has really made life easier for young women, because it still seems that things are difficult. Maybe the definition of gender has shifted, it isn’t really necessarily the primary focus through which we see everything, but there is anyway this hyper-sexualisation of everything and an emphasis on appearance today. I think that’s just as bad now if not worse than it was when I was working on that book. Everyone, from an early age, is focused on their image.

N: Have your ideas on feminism changed since then? 

C: My heart has always been with the outsider. In my work, I gravitate toward people who I think are brilliant and overlooked. And at that time, most of the people I was looking at in that way were women. Maybe less so now. I did a lot of writing about life on the border in the last decade. I got to know a number of really excellent artists from Mexicali and Tijuana, the two border towns, who’ve chosen to remain in those places rather than live in New York or LA. I got really interested in what happened to the lives of people who chose to stay and work outside the main centres, and whether it’s possible to have a viable career and do that.

N: You’ve always been writing a lot about art and artists. What’s the difference between telling a story though objects and telling a story with writing? 

C: The art world is always kind of way ahead of the literary world, don’t you think?

N: I think at times it has been, but not at the moment. In literature, today you’re further away from capitalism and the market than in art, which makes writing more independent and unrestricted. Subculture feels more alive in the world of words than the world of objects, today at least.

C: That’s interesting, I never worked as a visual artist, I mean I made those films as a way of postponing writing probably. I really don’t know that I can compare. But definitely the artists whose work I like create a world within their work and they allow the viewer to enter into it. I think that’s what people find so intimidating about visual art, they don’t quite know how to enter the world. So, the job of the critic is kind of to hold their hand and lead them into it.

N: Do you feel like you are creating worlds in your books? 

C: Sure, working on a book you’re basically creating a world. The world is the book. You go back to your computer day after day, sometimes very reluctantly, but eventually you enter that world and you build a little bit more onto it.

there is anyway this hyper-sexualisation of everything and an emphasis on appearance today

N: What have you been reading lately?

C: Oh, well I’ve been reading Halldór Laxness, very much on the topic of Saga. I just finished a big fat novel by him called Independent People about homesteaders in Iceland in the first part of the 20^th century. I love his work, it’s really fascinating and I decided to read Virgina Woolf’s Orlando, which I’ve never read before, found it a bit hard to take actually, a little mannered, a little stupid, and I also finished a great big fat book about cave paintings, called The Mind in the Cave, which was really fascinating. It’s arguing that the cave paintings at Lascaux and other ancient cave paintings were shamanic and made by people to depict things that they’d seen in chants. People gathered to see the cave paintings as kind of a gateway to another world that lay behind the stone. There’s a picture of a buffalo or an elk or a reindeer on the stone and you put your hand on that and it’s almost like you’re putting your hand on the wall to another world that’s just behind you, that’s accessible to the shaman but not to you, so that’s really fascinating.

N: That’s what art is a little bit, gates to other worlds?

C: Yeah, this writer was kind of arguing that hallucinogens were a big part of that and it seems very credible.

N: Do you believe that?

C: Definitely, why not? It makes sense – a lot of indigenous cultures had some form of, if not through plants, ways of inducing chants and heightened states. A big part of the spiritual experience in many indigenous cultures was to attain an altered state, outside of survival reality.

N: I think cave paintings are a gateway into a different world just because they’re such ancient history. It connects you with time to think about it.

C: Right! I got really interested in the Neanderthals too, I feel a lot of sympathy for them. Clearly these people had a language, but no one really knows what it was or how it worked and that’s so fascinating.

N: Was their inner life like our inner life, you think?

C: Well, the writer of this book thought that their brains were different from the upper Palaeolithic people, the two coexisted for a while and then the Neanderthals died out and the Palaeolithic took over, but after reading that I started reading more widely about the Neanderthals and it seems not everyone agrees with him about that. His idea was that the Neanderthal brain wasn’t capable of spirituality and that spirituality is an attempt to depict something that’s somehow beyond us. But other researchers on that subject are not sure about that. The Neanderthals had funerals.

N: So do elephants.

C: I didn’t know that.

N: They mourn by the dead body’s bones. It’s beautiful. A lot of monkeys do too, they’re very spiritual and sensitive beings. Do you think you have to be spiritual to be able to understand or write fiction? 

C: Maybe it’s spiritual in a really essential way. Not spiritual as defined by New Age people at all, but definitely committed to telling some very deep truth which isn’t always on the surface and can be hard to find. The writer has to go and get something and bring it back to have something to offer to the reader, there has to be a voyage, you have to undertake something to have something to offer. That isn’t necessarily always an uplifting message or a unifying one, it can be very negative and divisive but it has to come from somewhere.

N: What’s your relationship to folklore and early writing such as Edda? 

C: Well, I think one thing that’s great about a saga is it goes on and on and on and on, right? It’s like real life in that way, not like with the bourgeois novel with a beginning, middle and end, where things are concluded somehow by the end of the book. Life is never conclusive, right? It goes on and on and on… sagas are much more realistic about that. Sagas are a bit like history.

it was better to be something than to be nothing

N: I always thought of sagas or myths as autobiographies written such a long time ago that they now, years later, have become these very abstract tales, but somehow deep under there is a story about somebody’s private and mundane life. Do you believe that?

C: Yeah, of course I believe that. But I guess people saw their individual lives in very different ways than we do now.

N: In what different ways do you think?

C: They had a much more tribal life than we do, there was much less focus on the individual to shape a narrative that was different from everybody else’s narrative. The idea of the individual forging their own destiny, that’s a very contemporary Western idea.

N: The sagas are more general always, right?

C: There’s also the act of retelling that’s very important. The sagas were part of an oral tradition and sometimes the recitations of the sagas, which were poems, would go on all night. And sometimes they would be recited by not just one person but there would be parts that were reframed like a chorus by a whole group of people. Eileen Myle writes about this. In her book The Importance of Being Iceland there’s a beautiful essay that talks about Icelandic storytelling. People would have other occupations, they’d be fishers or they’d have other things they did during the day, being a poet would be kind of a side-line, but they would still be recognized as kind of one of the poets of their community and everyone would gather to hear these things, to participate in these stories. It’s such a different idea about poetry, as a kind of glue that binds the community, a story that everyone shares rather than a story of exceptions.

N: What is poetry today do you think?

C: I don’t know, you better ask a poet that one.

Profile	Chris Kraus
Interview	Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl