ABSTRACT
The generic status of autofiction is the subject of an ongoing debate in literary studies. While scholars of autofiction typically define the genre as marked by an uncertainty over truth-telling in nonfictional forms such as the memoir or autobiography, this essay examines two autofictions that attempt to accurately represent the self by using both fictive and nonfictive discourse extensively. Autofiction is best conceptualized as a genre that deliberately troubles audience expectations regarding fiction and nonfiction for both autobiographical and novelistic ends. Autofictions often signal their generic status by subverting audience expectations through contradictions between paratextual material and the narrative itself. Such narratives, through generic experimentation, foreground the conventions and limits of generic fictions and nonfictions. Autofiction does not collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, or fictive discourse and nonfictive discourse. Instead, writers of autofiction often deploy extensive fictionality in order to better illuminate actual life experiences.
