Autofiction is a literary genre that blurs the line between memoir and imagined narratives. Some writers associated with autofiction, like Sheila Heti in How Should a Person Be? and Rachel Cusk in the Outline trilogy, erase the line entirely while problematizing the existence of the fact-fiction binary in the first place. Readers are left to wonder what’s real and what’s made up and if it even matters. Los Angeles, a city that has long mixed fact and fiction, self-presentation and audience consumption, has, since February 2022, been home to NDA, the first-ever autofiction reading series, attracting authors like Dodie Bellamy, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Brontez Purnell.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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NDA organizer and writer Caitlin Forst comfortably holds the complexities of the genre. Her interest in autofiction came from seminal autofiction authors, including Chris Kraus, Sarah Manguso, and Kathy Acker, and seeing “the way that you can write a story that is entirely based on life but call it a novel.” She prefaced this June’s NDA event at Stories Books and Cafe in Echo Park, calling the reading a “monthly autofiction series that only semi-regularly features autofiction.” When poet Ariana Reines took the microphone last year, she introduced a selection of her poems by saying, “None of this is autofiction; it’s all true.” Kraus, the publicly anointed godmother of autofiction, who has also read at the event, says that she hates the term. An accompanying book, NDA: An Autofiction Anthology, was released in November 2022 by Archway Editions and contains a brief editor’s note by Forst: “Autofiction has recently been hit with moral, academic, and critical scrutiny. I am not moral, academic, or a critic.”
The series, like autofiction itself, hinges on the idea of what Forst calls “the pact between the audience and writer.”
“[It’s] based on the autofictive idea that what’s stated in the performance isn’t going to be disclosed as explicitly true or untrue,” Forst explains. “It’s not going to subscribe to one genre or another, and its basis in realism isn’t tied to a nonfictional understanding of factual ‘truth.’ Conflating the author-narrator identity raises the stakes of performance and allows for a lot of experimentation. Many of the readings either productively engage with the series’ autofictive premise by embracing the term or by reacting against it.”
Forst sees autofiction as a device more than an actual genre that can be retroactively applied to works. She also invites writers to the series who don’t have any explicit interest in autofiction to participate. Take, for example, indie darling Henry Hoke, who read from his recent novel, Open Throat, at NDA, which is narrated from the perspective of a mountain lion living below the Hollywood sign. Forst estimates that 85 percent of NDA readers either already write work they self-identify as having heavy autofictive elements or they write new material aimed at the autofiction theme specifically for the reading.
At June’s reading, the crowd was composed of literary acolytes toting vintage accessories, queers wearing all black, and the most annoying guy from your MFA talking about his Instagram presence. The reading series brings together the close-knit alt-literary scenes in Los Angeles where everyone seems to know one another.
Forst first approached Stories with the concept for the reading series in December 2021, when the bookstore was just formalizing its live events. She started by cold-emailing some writers for the series; as NDA began to grow, writers traveling from as far away as across the country began to reach out to her.
Chris Molnar, who used to run events for Stories and published the Archway Editions NDA anthology, credits NDA’s success to Forst but also to the community beacon that Stories has become for budding writers in Los Angeles. He also shares that Stories’ reputation helped nab some of the big-name talents, like Moshfegh and Miranda July. Before Moshfegh’s reading in September 2022, she shared with the crowd that she had written part of one of her earlier novels on the patio at Stories.
Los Angeles has also been in the spotlight for its so-called “guerrilla readings,” as coined by Mariella Rudi in the Los Angeles Times for those typically left out of the sanctioned literary community; the organizers of these readings are known for choosing underground or impromptu sites, such as Pollo a la Brasa’s parking lot in Koreatown. NDA also has a guerrilla aspect to it, with audience members spilling out into the parking lot and the much-meme’d “Stories alley,” a gathering place for writers working on their first screenplay or taking heat from the bookstore’s salty baristas.
“I think this is a good city for readings because there’s an awareness of the performance aspect and outlook that can sometimes be regarded as shallow,” Molnar says.
At a recent NDA, Sammy Loren, the organizer of the reading series Casual Encountersz, took the stage and read a work in progress that traced two narrators: one waking up drunk at Echo Park Lake lamenting love lost and another chasing tail at a reading at USC and seeking an intern for his washed-up literary career. Another reader, John Tottenham, announced that he was disappointed to recognize many faces in the crowd and yelled a passage from his Artillery magazine series that acutely described the genre:
“‘What isn’t autofiction? That would be a better question. This so-called genre exists merely to flatter the limitations of its self-proclaimed practitioners. You’re not breaking new ground by giving something that already exists a different name. Anyway, it’s hardly worth discussing.’
“‘Then why can’t you shut up about it?’ said Eden, somewhat uncivilly.
“‘That’s a good question,’ I conceded.”•
Forst’s next reading event will be held on August 27 on Stories’ patio.
