Is it A Work of Fiction, or nonfiction? Are my stories made up or did they really happen? Or is it a memoir? God tell us it’s not a memoir. Or an autobiography. Hang me if it’s autofiction. Stupid word, autofiction. Isn’t that the height of pretension, writing about yourself thinking anybody gives a damn? Mercifully now most autobiographies are ghost-written, written for the market, by a nameless professional, who must not have any thoughts or experiences of his or her own to write about.
Somewhere I heard Henry James wrote for the market[1]. So now we have a world full of market writers, the ghosts of Henry James. Autobiographies, ghost written celebrity memoirs, coffee table pabulum, here today and piled up with the other unread books at Goodwill in a couple of weeks. The dust jackets are always still pristine, fifty cents apiece, fill a grocery bag and take some home.
More to the point, what do you mean a bunch of short stories? Well, yes and no. Let’s call it a collection. Or better yet, a story cycle. No, I mean it’s a composite novel. As if throwing in the word novel might raise the chance the precious piece of work won’t end up in the slush pile. Or at Goodwill with the autobiographies and self-help guides. Things certainly worked out ok for Amy Tan and her short story cycle, The Joy Luck Club. And for Tim O’Brien with, The Things They Carried. Readers didn’t even know they weren’t holding a novel.
A writer can only hope.
[1] “I know of no writer who was hotter after the dollar than James was…” Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally & Robert Fitzgerald (The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1993)