Auto-Fiction - Viable Writing Method?

Saturday morning and I should be reading Celine or getting ready to go out or revising my own story. Instead I just read The Descent of Autofiction … and the Rise of the Literary Thrill-Seeking Industrial Complex by Jack Skelley. 

Since my PO my laptop is not a priority, I cannot digitize what I have in longhand. This leaves me revising in longhand (messy) or thinking about my writing (frustrating). This article comes within the "thinking" category.

The article opens in a way that defines and manages to discourage at the same time:

AUTOFICTION IS A fiction. It does not exist. More specifically, defined as a form of literature in which a first-person narrator may or may not represent the author, autofiction excludes next to nothing but genre fiction — e.g., crime stories, fantasy. If it’s everything, it’s nothing.

I kept reading until I reached what got me thinking:

 When it ignited in the late 1970s, Acker’s work had no specific classification. It did anything and went anywhere. Today, its giddy, free-range, punk-rock, first-person spews and cut-ups (spatula’d together equally from porno and the literary canon) liberate quasi-multitudes. Kraus was also among the first to consciously codify this non-genre when she detonated I Love Dick (Semiotext(e), 1997), her novel that plays with the “I” in supremely unsettling bursts....

I have in progress "Chasing Ashes" as a diary - not unlike these notes. It is about a federal prisoner returning home. I started the thing in prison with the intention of filling with what actually happened to me out here in civil society. I had read Knausgard's My Struggle in prison without seeing what it could teach me. I put away autofiction. Then I read John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. I am now seeing how to use the "I" with even more freedom than I thought available to me.

The article describes several novels. None of them describe anything I know about or have experienced. They do give me the feeling of freedom.

Now I need to get groceries. Ah! The prose of life!

sch

2/10/22