Fiction

Weird – and no doubt controversial – as it may sound, a book from fictional genre can resemble an autobiography. 

Sigrid Nunez, an American writer, wrote her seventh novel The Friend in the first person voice. In the middle of reading this story of a woman mourning the suicide of a close friend and taking in his bereft dog, I had to look back at the call number on the spine of the library book. I checked the letter F and convinced myself it's indeed a fiction, and not a memoir.

Writers like Proust, Isherwood, Duras, Knausgård, are particularly skilful in handling fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction. As Sigrid Nunez quips, "When someone asks why a highly unconventional book is called a novel, the author responds it's a novel because he says it is."