I Can’t Believe You Lied To Me

Autofiction, Verisimilitude and Relatability in Elif Batuman’s Works

Disclaimer: This essay is a work of literary criticism and should be read as such. It engages critically with the genre of autofiction and the works of public literary figures through analysis and personal reflection. Any references to individuals are limited to their published works and public personas, and are made without malice or defamatory intent.

Supervised by Doctor Adam Hammond of the English Department at the University of Toronto

Acknowledgements

This paper was one of the highlights of my undergraduate English experience at university. It feels so dissimilar to anything that I’ve written.

I’m very grateful to the support provided by my supervisor, Dr. Adam Hammond, who shared my enthusiasm across the research and helped significantly in shaping this paper. This is of course, my second tryst with him (the first one arose in my first year, and this one happens to be in my graduating year). Special thanks to Rachel Windsor, with whom I discussed the initiation of this dissertation.

I would also like to acknowledge the English Students’ Lounge of the Jackman Humanities Building, where the entirety of this paper was composed. I am grateful that the desk did not give up on me.

Throughout this paper, I have felt like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. More specifically, I resonated with his quote “I don’t need sleep, I need answers.” I turned to various stand-up shows and comedies across my writing, and they have helped me enormously in escaping any slump that arose from all the overthinking. For all the laughter taken away by my revelations in this paper, I am happy I was able to find it elsewhere.

Epigraph

Before we begin, I must request that you trust me. Do you? My essay always mistook Batuman for Batman, but I suppose she would say: “it’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me” and I would agree. What you’re about to experience will send shivers down your spine. Reader discretion is advised.

Introduction // How It All Began

I was driving to a forest in central India a few months back. It was in the middle of June, and the rains were wayward. Typical Indian monsoons. The sun set randomly on most days, and you needed a lot of luck to ensure that you were not left in the dark. Beside me, on the passenger’s seat, was a friend of mine. She was visiting from Berlin. She asked me whether it was safe to drive with the broken headlights of my car, surrounded by vegetation and all the Indian mysteries that were hidden inside. It was quite a tourist question. There was some light blue left in the skies, and it lit up the road enough for me to see a few kilometres ahead. Reports of animal attacks on vehicles had also subsided by that time. Every time lightning struck, my friend shouted at me. She kept accusing me of endangering her. She had even shown me the phone number of her lawyer, and threatened to sue me. It was quite distracting to my driving. There was also no cell network.

The car could have gone anywhere, and anything could have happened to us, but the papers would have only reported a missing Indian man and American woman. She was German. It was a habit of our newspapers to misrepresent the visitors. In an act of sheer defiance, she undid her seatbelt, opened the car door and leaped across onto the road. Due to the speed of my car and my focus, I dashed in front. When I turned back and lit up the headlights, she was gone. In the middle of the road were the rain, my sputtering car and an abrupt roar of a tiger. It seems the poachers had been unsuccessful after all. It would have been a great moment to report had I saved her. I would have been a hero. No newspaper approached me, though.

You inevitably have opinions on the story I just told; about me, my friend, the newspapers, the weather and the tiger. Do you believe me, though? The fact of the matter is that I have not driven to a forest in the rain or in June. I do not have a German friend, nor have I ever abandoned people in the middle of the road. I am unaware of the accuracy with which our newspapers capture an individual’s nationality. The rains, though, are pretty violent in central India (Gayathri Vaidyanathan). There also have been incidents of people dying on the roads due to rains (Ashok Sharma). However, my story itself is not factually true. It is simply inspired by events that have taken place in real life. Autofiction, coined by combining autobiography and fiction, is a genre where essentially autobiographical and fictional details are merged. Since that is the case, is my story not autofiction? What does it matter if it is or is not? Do other writers, who have way more acclaim than I do, deliberate this too?

Elif Batuman does not care about her work being called autofictional. In fact, in an interview with Najwa Jamal about autofiction, she declared the autofiction label “shady” (Najwa Jamal). I find it interesting that she does not expand on the term shady. What is shady? Not being sure about your work as either autobiography or fiction is shady. Is shadiness in novels good or bad? Shadiness promotes unclarity. Batuman also does not seem to actively condone or support the categorization of her works as “autofiction.” She just leaves it be. I would argue that to say that an author is lying while telling the truth is equally harmful to the reader as when an author lies while claiming to tell the truth.

Later in the interview, Batuman goes on to say that all fiction “pulls from” real life, so to claim a work of fiction has autobiographical elements is redundant (Jamal). This whole act of labelling, she suggests, only indicates how the act of “creative imagination” is “overvalued” in fiction–especially in the United States (Jamal). She is saying that there is less thought and more retelling in fiction. In that, fiction does not imagine how else the writer’s observed reality can exist, but it simply narrates the facts from their life.

This lack of caring is dangerous. She is essentially supporting a manipulated version of reality as fiction. So, an autobiographical writer can also say whatever they want, and get away with it. What’s the difference then, between them and a writer of fiction?

An even more nihilist approach would be to say that nothing matters and all writing should just be enjoyed. While it is true that the writer has limited agency in who reads their works and how they interpret it, a reader’s agency is primarily influenced by how the writer presents the work. A reader, like me, would approach a work of fiction assuming falsehood; I can create my own interpretation of the characters and narratives in my head. I can essentially understand what I wish of the character from the work, so long as I can find the logic to justify it. The character will not change. I cannot do that for a person because well, they can. I will explain this with reference to Catherine Gallagher’s article later in this paper. Similarly, I will read a memoir by simply digesting, and not confabulating, the details present in the work. Real life need not feel interesting. But reading someone else’s life, something usually very distinct from my own, does. It entertains me to imagine how someone else must have lived.

I encountered Elif Batuman’s works due to her being one of my friends’ favourite authors. Her favourite work is The Idiot. It felt jarring to me for an undergraduate to adore a four-hundred-plus page campus novel. Would it not feel too similar to the life we were living? I suppose that was the charm of Batuman’s autofiction. It made her feel seen and heard through the characters. I read The Idiot first, through which I discovered its sequel Either/Or and proceeded to examine what about the novels convinced an undergraduate student of its charm. Her memoir, The Possessed, was the last work of hers I read because I wanted to finish the fictional works first.

I also bring up life and the idea of identity because Batuman steals the ability of a reader like me to imagine the character beyond what’s written. Before reading The Possessed I read Selin as a general representation of a university student; she was like me. Although, she did go to Harvard, and I attend, what is famously dubbed the ‘Harvard of the North.’ Nonetheless, I figured that whatever she experienced, I could or had too, even if in different ways. She was a template for university life. When I found out Selin was a Batuman replica, because everything that happened to Batuman very coincidentally happened to Selin, I could no longer trust Selin to represent me. I couldn’t trust Batuman to lie or tell me the truth. Who could I trust? I thought I made a friend in her, but turns out Selin was only Batuman’s. She was possessed by her.

People, however, lack this finiteness. They are not bound by any pages or words. They are always adapting. People change, people grow, characters remain. When it becomes difficult to distinguish between a character and a person, as is the case with Batuman’s autofiction, it becomes even more arduous to categorise a character as a character. Is this not shady to you, Batuman?

It is easy for Batuman to be nihilist about this situation. Her work is out. The Idiot was even categorised as “fiction” in the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018. She did not deny the categorisation. So I read it and its sequel Either/Or knowing that the content of the novels is untrue. That’s it’s all made up and inspired by real life, not based on it. With the availability of her memoir though, this claim itself is proven untrue. The fiction of her fiction is fictional. Everything seems true, and yet I cannot discern with confidence what exactly it is, that is true. Extremely shady for sure.

My research shows that it does matter how writers react to the categorisations of their work. To passively accept a work filled with autobiographical elements like The Idiot as fiction prevents the readers from reading the work as either fiction or autobiography. It is integral to the work and the reader that the work be categorised accurately, or even that, the author should clarify whether a work of theirs is fictional or not. Autofiction occurs within Batuman’s novels, I argue, because she refuses to clarify the aforementioned idea; she leaves it to the reader to discern whether something is true or not. This is possible for the reader to do because they have access to her memoir; the place where she admitted the reality of her novels.

The reader is no longer creatively interacting with the work but rather acting as a detective, trying to figure out if a work of fiction is fictional or not: the reader is effectively, no longer reading fiction as fiction. They test how well the reader knows the writer. A fictional novel need not do that. I have never met Batuman so I can not say I know her intimately. And it should not matter if I did, because a work of fiction, something that is inspired by real-life issues, need not have anything true in it.

When a work of fiction is written, even if it is autofictional, the reader can entrust the characters to be fictional. This is because there is no verifiable detail about the characters or the novels. Batuman does not let this be possible. She presents autofiction as a genre where characters cannot be related to or identified with by the reader. While I disagree with her representation of the genre, she also complicates how autobiography and fiction can be merged. Since she leaves her memoir available to the reader, they can at any point correlate the details with her fiction and lose their identification with the character.

#Relatable

If you could not tell, Selin is arguably the most influential character in my reading experience of Batuman’s autofiction. After all, my experience is that of a reader. One of the many who happens to have read Batuman’s fiction. We are introduced to Selin as an eager Harvard freshman who demonstrates her passion for literature by “want[ing] to know what books really meant” (The Idiot, 16). She admits to liking stories for the same reason her mother did: the central meaning (16). She and her mother believed that all stories had this central meaning, this one meaning (16). This meta-comment on the structure of fiction within a work of ‘fiction’ foreshadows what I too found to be a lack of plot in The Idiot. The form of the novel does not occur with one central conflict, but rather a series of episodes that take Selin to different locations, demanding her to perform different tasks. This was mimicking how I lived. There is no one conflict that drives me to do what I do, but a series of micro-decisions that form the state in which I end up being.

Selin is immediately also established to be slightly egotistical when she observes her literature professor’s body language at the end of class: “[n]o matter how dumb and obvious the questions were, [the professor] never seemed to understand them” (17, emphasis added). It seems to her that all stories must exist with a “central meaning” (16) and anyone who does not understand that, from students to scholars, is dumb or makes ‘obvious’ observations. After all, anyone “could [either] get that meaning, or you could miss it completely” (16). Her condescension of the professor, an academic of the subject, also suggests that she does not think he gets this unexplained “central meaning” (16). Put another way, she understands the texts, and the professor does not. She was smart. I was like that. Like Selin, I too, felt that professors never got the “point” of the story, whatever that was (16). It is difficult for experts like us out here. How could a professor miss the point that I saw? Only my points made sense. How could a book suggest two different ideas?

My ideas, like Selin’s I infer, would have changed the literary discourse. However, all professors could do was talk about the “other thing[s]” (17). Much like the nineteenth-century Russian landowners, who felt conflicted about “really” being a part of Europe (16, emphasis added), Selin seems to experience a similar distance from the setting of the literature class. It defies her knowledge of stories that her mother provided her (16), and she is intolerable of the “dumb” questions and ‘obvious’ discussion points of her classmates (17). If only there were smarter people in these classes. I’m right there with you, Selin. I think we exceed the expectations of an undergraduate literature student by miles.

We also see Selin express her deep love for writing in a tone synonymous to her dismissal of the literature professor’s ability to entertain discussion. She is very assured in her ability as a writer. She “had a deep conviction that [she] was good at writing, and [in some way she was] already a writer” (96). This is despite the fact that she had “ever written anything” (96). She also did not know if “anyone would [have ever] like[d] to read” anything she wrote (96). I too, was confident in my ability as a writer in my freshman year and I was surrounded by people who supported my belief. Selin is shown to be too much like me. She constantly reminds the reader of how a university student of literature and creative writing can be. I, too, have been frequently called a character. Maybe Selin and I were always meant to morph as one. Batuman reiterates this meta-commentary on writing in this scene. This scene is written by a writer, who writes about a character who writes and in this moment is thinking about writing. Reading this scene without any knowledge of her memoir eliminates any questions of whether Batuman, the voice behind Selin, ever thought this too. It should not matter even if it did. Selin is not Batuman. The question is vague enough that it can arise within any writer; it certainly did in me.

Selin’s confidence here also reflects a sense of conviction required by a writer to put their work out there. She is doubtful of anyone ever reading her work, but she still shows it to her friend Hannah. Hannah understands Selin to be unique: “[Hannah] couldn’t get over how many pages [Selin] had written, […] nobody else in the whole school was capable of writing such long and detailed stories” (96). When I wrote in my freshman year, I too wanted to write what “nobody else in the whole school was capable of writing” (96). Selin’s interaction here only demonstrates the possibility of another writer sharing similar ambitions. With specific regards to this scene being ‘fictional’ as a reader, I recognise that this scene only demonstrates a possibility of the multiple encounters or thoughts a student-writer can have in their undergraduate tenure. While I too wanted to be unique, I did not share the same level of confidence to show my work to a friend before publishing it. I wanted to get it published before any of my friends read it; I needed the validation of the newspaper before other writers could give it.

Selin is different than I was back then, but it still does not prevent me from ever doing what she did. She reminds readers that she is not a definitive being of a writer. She is rather a very specific character who happens to experience these events based on the specific calculations and incidents of the fictional version of Harvard where she studies. The focus of self here is very narcissistic by nature. I would even argue that this provocation of self-awareness is essential, as the reader is constantly invited to interact with the character, by detecting similarities between them and the character’s experiences.

While Selin-the-literature-student is the primary version of her that remained with me after reading, it is also important to examine her relations with other characters in the novels. Her obsession with Ivan largely constructs her identity. He is not necessarily the motivating factor for her to execute tasks but rather a major preoccupation as she goes about her days. She counts days until he replies to her emails: “eight days went by and he didn’t write, and then it was ten days, and I was sure he was never going to write to me again” (125). This occurs multiple times across the novel (116; 133; 196; 224). In each instance she wonders whether Ivan would write, and expresses a similar frustration and defeatist attitude, almost accepting that he just never would (116; 125; 133; 196; 224). I get it. As someone who has had his fair share of one-sided crushes, I understand the frustration that comes with being ghosted. Selin could not stop being relatable. It is like she knew I was reading this novel. While I have not had to communicate with a crush over email, nor have they been out of town like Ivan when doing so, the feeling of agony that comes with not receiving a reply on time is similar.

Like the university student version of her, there seems to be a constant connection between how a fictional character feels to how the reader feels. While the exactness of the situation need not be true for both, as is the case in my experience, the fictional character again depicts the possibility of such instances happening in the reader’s young-adult years. Her crush on Ivan, while largely shown through her frustration over his communication skills, also manifests itself varyingly. She wanted to talk to him when she felt overwhelmed (92), she is unable to deny the distant presence he has in her life (140), and she even felt “tamed” by him (375). These are again feelings I could relate too, even though I had experienced them differently. I, like her, desperately wanted my crush to respond to my messages when I was feeling burdened by academics, or as Selin puts it “things of unknown or dubious meaning” (92). While my crush was not graduating and going to California (140), I also could not accept the idea that they disliked me enough to be distant. And lastly, while not like a fictional dragon (375), having a crush did make me feel like their actions dictated how I felt about myself; they controlled me like Ivan ‘tamed’ Selin. Through Selin’s frustrations with Ivan’s inaccessibility, I am reminded of the feelings that arise when a university student crushes on another. It seemed spooky how well Selin knew I felt when this happened.

That is the power a fictional character holds. Without existing, they validate your feelings. They certainly did for mine, and I am confident that there are other readers who would relate with one if not all of her frustrations. Batuman’s autofiction compels the reader into admitting their most embarrassing frustrations, because they have a character, an unreal person experiencing everything a real person does. It does not seem far from possible, to some degree, because the reader’s experiences ensure that they are at some level possible.

While Selin’s undergraduate experiences in The Idiot provided an introduction of her, her postgraduate endeavours in Either/Or solidified what the life of a literature student really looks like. I am closer to postgraduate life than my freshman year. I am convinced that Selin knows too much about me, as she continued to live experiences that did not appear alien from mine. She says that reading Eugene Onegin was one of the “main reasons” that she “learn[t] Russian” (Either/Or, 71). She was excited to read that book because it was also the second book of Russian literature that she had ever read after Anna Karenina (71). Again, I get it. I have also been excited to read the German poems by Goethe before they were translated into English. I took one intermediate German class to even revise my knowledge of the language in hopes of expanding the range of literature that I could have studied. It did not help the eeriness I was feeling knowing that Selin knew so much about me. While I have not had peers particularly interested in Russian literature, I can speak from personal experience that learning a new language propels a literature student into more research.

At this point I am convinced that Selin and I are one and the same. At least by virtue of imagined possibility. I could be like her, given how similarly our passion for literature and writing manifest themselves. Like Selin herself says: “it felt exciting to have a personal connection […] to this material that was so far from my own experience” (141). Well yes, I am not a Turkish girl with an undergraduate life spent at Harvard, I am a passionate literature student as established. Batuman’s autofiction only reiterates this ‘excitement’ because it reminds readers of how close the character is to the reader. Even though the characters are and will always be out of reach from fact, the idea that a character could echo the feeling of the reader so accurately bonds the reader to them. They constantly invite the reader to figuratively ‘reach out’ and exist in a sense of intimacy which is left one-sided. Selin will never respond to my awe despite me having reacted audibly multiple times. She was right. It is agonising to be ghosted.

Certainly Batuman too recognises these risks if she is able to input these thoughts in a character’s mind. Seeing how she too has a memoir alongside two fictional novels, the reader knows to approach both these works differently. The Elif in The Possessed cannot be the Selin in The Idiot or Either/Or. In fact, no one can be Selin, because she does not exist. If she did, she would have heard all my gasps and #relatable moments. Maybe Batuman finds similarities in her passion for Russian literature as Selin, for her memoir is about her ‘adventures’ with Russian literature. Or it could be that upon remembering the events that transpired in her life as a literature student, she recognised the possibilities of how a student of literature exists. Like me, maybe Batuman too finds a sense of relatability between her and Selin.

Be For Real

What makes a character different from a person? Catherine Gallagher’s The Rise of Fictionality gives an account of how ‘fictionality’ occurs within a character or text. She cites various scholars and historical texts to determine that fiction operates with the notion of being unreal, and the readers submit to this knowledge when undertaking fictional works to read. In the essay she cites Peter McCormick to argue that “fictional characters are surprisingly exhaustible” and that “they lack the infinity of ever receding perceptual horizons and, unlike self-conscious entities, they lack the inexorable privacy of ever changing varieties of mental states” (Gallagher, 358, emphasis added). Unlike my friends, who change their personality depending on whom they hang around every week, fictional characters are limited by the words the writer gives them.

Certainly their histories and actions can be interpreted differently, but they cannot act beyond or provide more information about their background than what is already there in front of the reader. People are infinite. A character can be five-feet and stay annoying throughout the novel, regardless of the setting or conflict. My sister for example, also five-foot-five, chooses to be annoying by disturbing me when I am sleeping. She might, all of a sudden, and I deeply pray for this, stop being annoying tomorrow onwards. Characters cannot do that. It can be argued that the reader may change their perception of a character’s action–initially finding it annoying but later reassessing it–yet the character itself remains confined to the pages, and cannot act beyond them to influence the reader.

Despite the contrast, Gallagher highlights that “the reader’s involvement in the dominant modern form of fiction has generally been thought to come about through some sort of psychic investment in, or even identification with, the characters” (350, emphasis added). If this is the case, why and how do real people like readers identify with fictional characters? Why do we interact with those who will always remain the same? Why is their temporality compatible with our infinitude? According to Gallagher it arises due to us being “conscious of their fictionality” which prompts us to “begin—or not to begin—the intense imaginative activity of reading character” (353). We are essentially co-creating the character with the author. We are understanding what motivates the character into performing any action without them telling us. This forces us into relating our motivations with them. I could identify with Selin knowing she was not real because the similarities between us validated how I was feeling. The feeling itself was not exclusive to me, and naturally I responded with a “psychic investment” (350) in her life.

Reader Response theory follows a similar school of thought. It states that “the text activates the reader’s early experiences concerning his/her experiences with literature and with his/her life; guides for the selection, rejection and order of what comes forth; and regulates what should be brought to the reader’s attention” (Cagri Mart, 81). The text is given life by the writer, but it is sustained by the reader. I am very important in all of this. Selin’s experiences ‘activated’ mine across instances, and ‘concerned’ them with Selin, as this paper has shown. Selin would be a different person had I not read her. I am what they call her knight in shining armour, but I do not know how to joust. Selin did not either. See, we’re so similar.

When Selin is impatient for Ivan’s text, and despite her denial, I know it is because she is obsessed with this one-sided crush which is not to prosper. Her impatience though is not far from how I feel in such situations. As I’ve established in the previous part of the paper, I related to Selin due to this resemblance of our feelings. This relatability is what Gallagher highlights in her argument. This “embarrassing” activity (352) is inevitable according to her, “[b]ecause we know their accessibility means fictionality, we are inclined to surrender to the other side of their double impact: their seductive familiarity, immediacy, and intimacy” (356, emphasis added). Whatever we imagine of this character need not at all be true. This is plainly due to everything about the character being untrue in reality, and only true for them in that fictional universe. They do not exist so no claim about them, which causes us to feel seen or represented, can be denied. As Gallagher says: “[i]f such a person did exist, the usual boundary of personhood would be in place, and the reality created by the fiction would disintegrate” (357, emphasis added). I can happily call Selin an imaginary friend because what is she going to do, refuse it? I have to analyse Selin to understand her, because her life is unfolding to me at the same time as it is for her. A real person has already lived the experiences, so their psychology is predetermined. And yet, despite this, a real person is unpredictable. My idea of Selin will not change, because she has not or cannot do more than what she already has. I have created my version of her that I take with me after reading the two novels.
So to know who is not real is great. But what about texts that talk about real people? You know, autobiographical works? Thomas Larson says that they “generally avoid introspection and scenic drama and, instead, summarize the significant people and events in the author’s life” (Larson, 17, emphasis). They simply tell what the author has done or experienced. Unlike a fake story told by my drunken friends at a bonfire, an autobiographical work is boring. It is not an imagination, but a factual retelling of what happened. Nothing more could happen in that past. A writer could create a new backstory about a character in a novel, because it does not exist until they make one.

The people of autobiographies exist with predetermined histories, even if the reader is not privy to all of it. That is the difference between the unreal (fiction) and the true (autobiographies, memoirs): the former has the luxury of imagination, things can be created in it, but in the latter the events and people just exist. They exist. They do not fly, have not attended an institution different than the one they have claimed to do so, and have a particular order of life to follow. They might envision a different way of living, but their life does not instantly transform into that vision. To a reader, the people of autobiographical works are immovable from their state of being. I can relate to the author of an autobiography, I can identify what about the author’s life I find relatable, but they can change how they present themselves. They can suddenly become not relatable. I then no longer can identify with them. Autobiographies, as Larson suggests, simply provide the context of the author up until the moment the autobiography is released. It does not bind their life to it. The autobiographer does not stop living their life after their biography is released. Their personality is susceptible to change. A work of fiction holds a character to the novel itself, and lets the reader, as this paper has shown, interact with what they can identify in or with the character.

April Fools

I must say it is humiliating to have your trust broken. Go ahead. Mock me. You knew this was coming, did you not? I should have listened. Why did I read her memoir? I was happily deceived by her fiction. I am the fool who trusted fiction to lie to me. The one time I wanted to be lied to, I was not. Or was I? Were Batuman’s fictional works a lie all along? But is that not fiction? Or was her memoir a lie? No, that cannot be. I do not know how to read fiction anymore. What if Tolkien’s dragons are also real? What more can fiction tell me that is factual? Selin is real. So, I am forbidden from interacting with her. I can no longer claim relatability? What is a reader left to do?

I will call this whole process of Selin being taken away from me, and me simultaneously losing any ability to identify with her, a neiterification, wherein the ‘fictional’ character in Batuman’s autofiction is something–but that something is neither entirely false nor fully real–and, consequently, cannot be read as a character by the reader. This is because there is no distinguishable detail between Selin and Elif Batuman aside from their names. Selin in this case, thus, is effectively not a character. It puts the others in doubt of being one too. The novels thus, stop being fictional. This whole mess is neitherification.

Ivan is not some random, hypothetical math major who happened to be in Selin’s Russian class, and later went to Berkeley for graduate school. No no no, you are sorely mistaken if you were fooled by the advent of fiction here. He is, as it turns out, Valya in her memoir, with whom Batuman fell in love and who had the exact same life trajectory as Ivan–she met him in a beginner Russian class, and he went to Berkeley for graduate school (The Possessed, 12). The Russian class does not stop being scandalous here. It is in that class that both Selin and Batuman read “The Story of Vera” for their first reading. Someone please tell me this is not true. How can this happen? Bit by bit, Selin is being taken away from me. All my relating to how it feels to be ghosted, the frustration that I identified with her in these situations is all gone because now I, the reader, know that Ivan is a very specific individual, and only he was as uncommunicative via emails and this idea of a math major ghosting a literature student is not as generalisable. Not unless of course, the math major is Ivan (or Valya), and you are Selin (or Elif).

So for the reader to understand what it is like to fall in love with Ivan (again, not a character) who does not respond to emails and leaves Selin (Elif Batuman’s replica) frustrated, the reader must live the life Elif Batuman did. They must find Valya and replicate this situation at Harvard, as they pursue undergraduate classes in literature and beginner Russian. Seems like a lot of work for a reader to do. So really, relatability in fiction is inaccessible now? A reader, who as Gallagher and Mart point out, inevitably engage in the “imaginative activity of reading character” (Gallagher, 353), can no longer do that because Selin and Ivan have effectively stopped being characters. Selin, by becoming Batuman, now possesses the “infinity of ever receding perceptual horizons” (Gallagher, 358) because Batuman can change, and Selin’s life story inevitably also will.

But who has not written about their ex after a break-up? Or in Selin’s case, after a horrible situationship with awful communication? But Ivan is not the only recurrence that we notice. This is the case when she engages with Russian literature too. Elif Batuman read Eugene Onegin and found Tatyana’s dream “moving” (The Possessed, 6). Selin in Either/Or also “wanted to learn” Tatiana’s letter (Either/Or, 72). Both these likings arise due to her resonating with Tatiana’s love for Pushkin (Either/Or, 74) and the mystifications such experiences had on “young people” (The Possessed, 6). Sure, an author and a character can happen to like the same boy and text coincidentally but there is exactness to both these instances. Selin does not like a random math major, but Valya. She also does not read Eugene Onegin due to a compulsion, but a gravitation that was also felt by Batuman. It becomes hard to distinguish between the two. Selin’s feelings and habits grow more and more specific to Batuman. In doing so, Selin is growing more and more distant from me. Why does no one want to be friends with me? I thought, I finally thought that maybe I could see my feelings represented in Selin but now Batuman has swept in and stolen her.

Let’s play a game. You tell me who said it, Batuman or Selin. Ready? Here we go: this person read Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose” in a college creative writing class. Here is another one: linguistics had “let” this person “down” (The Possessed, The Idiot). The answer to all these questions is the same: neither either nor or, but both (The Possessed, Either/Or). The reason Selin switches out of linguistics is verbatim the reason for Batuman’s switch. She quotes herself from her own memoir in a ‘fictional’ novel. She is quite literally blurring what is autobiographical and not, because this is evidence of her fictional novels not being inspired by her events, something a work of autofiction might do, but is essentially restating in more detail what happened in her life.

Batuman, though, does not stop there. I wish she would. Even Selin’s experience as a researcher with Let’s Go in Turkey (Either/Or, 281) is based on Batuman’s experience as a researcher with Let’s Go in Turkey (The Possessed, 84). Just having this knowledge is enough grounds to understand that Selin’s experience is not fictional. Both Selin and Batuman’s grandmothers also have apartments in Ankara (The Possessed, Either/Or). They both should really talk to each other. I doubt anyone would say anything different than the other. Batuman would clearly have more to identify with Selin than I do. They are practically the same person. After getting me to connect with Selin, Batuman has practically gone: Haha, you thought you could bond with her? Think again. I have never been to Turkey and yet, my hopes of understanding what might a character feel like while travelling to a place despised by her mother (Either/Or, 279) are now gone because the mother is only Batuman’s, and the displeasure is only hers.

I do not know what to do with my identification anymore. This is precisely what Batuman does to the reader. She creates this paralysis of identification, the abovementioned neitherification, where the reader is stunned. Batuman appears twice, as herself and Selin. This would be alright if she had simply written two memoirs, but no. She disguises herself and betrays the reader by not admitting that. Even if she did, it is too late. I, like many readers, have already approached her novels as fiction. She cannot undo that. I am neitherified. I have now neither imaginatively read the once-were characters nor truly recognised what was true in Batuman’s life. Maybe not all of Selin’s life was Batuman’s. But there is no way of knowing, because she has trusted the reader, a total stranger, to intimately examine what details seem true to her and deduce accordingly. But why does Batuman do that? Why does she entrust the reader to figure out fact and fiction from her works? Can the reader even do that? When she provides readers a tool to do the distinguishing, like her memoir, she is distracting the reader from building her characters and getting them to be detectives. The whole act of identification is deemed impossible because the writer does not get the chance to build anyone.

Arguably, if any writer writes autofiction, they cannot disclose any factual details which are seen in their novels like Batuman has done. This way, the reader can at least just build the character throughout their reading experience.

Batuman also does not let go of the deliberation around what makes a writer or a story. Maybe I have been wrong all along. Maybe I have simply misunderstood what fiction is. These works keep me in this speculation around what I really know. Both her and Selin make comments on writers and writing. Both again seem occupied by similar issues. The reminders do not stop. Selin tells Margit that “[m]aybe someday” after graduation Selin will write a “novel” about the characters (The Idiot, 321). Did Batuman effectively, by writing The Idiot not just do that? I would argue she did. Given the closeness of accuracy between Selin’s life at Harvard, and Batuman’s own admittance of what all she did as an undergraduate at Harvard, I do not see a vivid distinction between the characters of the novels and her own life. Margit, if you are reading this, congratulations (or not, if you were unhappy about your portrayal). Your identity has now been manipulated by this autobiographical work, masquerading as fiction.

Batuman wonders in her memoir: “What if you wrote a book and it was all true?” (The Possessed, 25). She wonders this to contrast the “European novel tradition” which encouraged a “disconnect” from real life in fictional novels (24). Well, her question is valid. What if a book was all true? It appears in her memoir, which by nature is required to be true. To consider this possibility within works of fiction is doing great disservice to the term itself. She is imagining the coalescing of fact with falsehood, and by suggestion, understanding all of that to be alright. That question is answered by an autobiography. I would argue that the concept of autofiction is to blame for her misunderstanding of the two genres, as she is viewing her insertion into the work, something the European novel tradition discouraged, as equally applicable for fiction as the disconnect itself. Autofiction as a genre in Batuman’s writing enables this, but what Batuman has done shocks the reader. They are losing their ability to read a work of fiction, as a work of fiction. It is incredibly frustrating. Give me one thing, do not confuse me for no reason. What are you getting out of this, Batuman’s autofiction? Am I misreading the room, given that writers and critics are still defending autofiction?

When You Have Eliminated All Which Is Impossible, Then Whatever Remains, However Improbable, Must Be The Truth (Or Something Like That)

Autofiction writers clearly believe that a reader is not a reader, but a detective. Ironically, I am expected to be the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, and possess his astute brain while reading a work of autofiction. Lauren Oyler also thinks so. I bring her in because she, too, is a contemporary writer. Her novel Fake Accounts is also considered autofictional. This is not because she has an autobiographical work which verifies the details of her fiction like in Batuman’s case, but simply because she admits it. In this section I position her criticism alongside Batuman’s fiction to understand the difference between admitted autofiction and declared autofiction. This section explores the different reactions a reader undergoes when a writer admits to writing autofiction versus when they notice autobiographical overlaps in fictional works despite the writer’s denial.

Oyler’s long essay “I Am The One Who Is Sitting Here For Hours And Hours And Hours” ponders the role and impact of autofiction, from the point of view of the writer. Even though Oyler has not written any autobiographical works like Batuman, she now has to resist admitting anything true about the novel. It does not matter how she reveals it, because once she does, the reader begins to lose their ability and license to build the characters in her novel/

When she spoke to the social media manager she fictionalised in her novel he “demurred” (Oyler). What else did she expect? For him to be awed? For him to be joyful knowing that his representation was not just unconsented, but also manipulated? Oyler, you are not supposed to reveal who the real version of the fake character is in an essay. You should have written a memoir before your novel and pretended that Fake Accounts is solely a work of fiction. Learn to lie properly.

This comes after two of her ex-boyfriends suspected that she had written the character after them. Here’s the deal. Even without the social media manager being told that the ‘fake’ character is actually him, the idea that there was so much resemblance between the real life people and her fake protagonist is in itself a problem. If she is doing so, I do not understand why she even calls her novel fictional at this point. The issue of there being almost no distinct distinguishability between the real, existing people and those that are made up prevents the character of the novel from being a character. Where might have we seen this before? They are neitherified, Oyler.

So there is clearly some reluctance on Oyler’s part in being against her manipulation of the real life characters. In fact, I instead see a very arrogant support towards it. But why does she, an autofiction writer, think writers write autofiction? According to her “it allows the author to access the benefits of memoir” without them “having to ‘own’ or answer for any of the information being revealed or not revealed the way [it] would if [the writer] were writing nonfiction” (Oyler). And yet, she blames the reader for being “distracted by the gossipy mentality” and contemplating the ‘trueness’ of the content when reading her fiction (Oyler).

No no no, you cannot just put this on me. I have not donned the hat of Holmes to be called a gossiper. I cannot help but investigate what is true or not. For something that is not exclusively fiction, what do you expect from the reader? I am not imagining the author as a “celebrity” (Oyler), something that she very narcissistically suggests, but am in this constant influx of not knowing whether I can befriend the character before me. What I notice here is a sense of obviousness behind an autofictional writer’s motivations. A sense of: why else would this be written?

I find this troubling. Especially because I am still not over the betrayal that the few words of Batuman’s memoirs have inflicted upon me, something that the almost eight hundred pages worth of her fiction could not save. This access of benefits that Oyler mentions is called the “great trick” of the genre (Oyler). Well, yes. It is a great magic trick. The writer goes lookie-here, shows you a work of fiction and tells you it is a work of fiction (the empty hat trick), and suddenly, voila! They pull the facts out and reveal that the novel is now true (rabbit out of the hat). You cannot relate anymore.

Can fiction conveniently use elements of autobiographical writing and not disclose what parts are true? The memoir in Oyler’s argument is presented as a detachable object. In that, it can somehow be disassembled. The elements which compose it (the insertion of the author), thus, are seen as things which autofiction can just use. Similarly, it can disregard the other elements of it (the factual accuracy) and be fine. However, when a memoir or autobiography attempts to dismantle fiction, incorporate its storytelling elements, and make itself appear ‘less true’ than it seems, the author faces criticism. Does that sound familiar? Perhaps I should remind you in Oprah’s signature style. Ladies and gentlemen, James Frey! He was cancelled for lying in his memoir. Shouldn’t a writer of fiction be held to a similar expectation? Why do we discount the role of falsehood in a work that is supposed to be unreal?

Oyler thinks the reader is way more obsessed with the writer than her characters. If only I could tell her the charm Selin left on me. She “think[s] that anyone who has read [her] novel knows everything they need to know about [her], and anyone who has not is missing out on some essential aspect of [her] personality that they cannot achieve true intimacy with [her] without” (Oyler, emphasis added). Allow me to quote Dua Lipa here: “[c]ause if you think I care about you now [after reading your fiction] / Well, [girl], I don’t give a -” (Dua Lipa, IDGAF).

My reading experience shows that it was not until I read the memoir of the author, that I found out anything I needed to know about them. If more autofiction writers (and especially Batuman) operate with similar schools of thought as Oyler, it explains why they ‘detach’ their real details and paste them onto the characters. While yes, the writers are technically, subconsciously providing ‘fragments’ of themselves onto their characters, the writers are not imagining how these characters would react to the issues that the writer has observed. The character replicates the writer, and does not resemble some deep corner of their beliefs or psychology. Might I add, the latter is inevitable for all fictional works but it leaves enough difference between the finitely existing characters and infinitely existing people that the reader is able to trust their identification with the characters. Readers are not left to be detectives then, and can simply exist as readers, interacting with the actions of the characters.

You cannot have both in one work. The reader cannot exhaust their time trying to figure out whether what they read was true or not. Their time is utilised instead, as Gallagher has also shown, building the character when reading fiction. Without the license to do this, they are not reading fiction. Although Oyler proudly claims that she is “the one who is sitting here, in front of [her] computer, for hours and hours and hours, thinking and putting words and images and ideas together in what is often a quite difficult process” (Oyler, emphasis added), it does not discount the paralysis caused within the reader from autofiction’s hybridity.

Like one stubborn child, autofiction is not accepting the fiction or truth, because the writer thinks that the reality is too interesting to lose, while being incredibly shy of owning it. She has made the reader sit here for hours and hours and hours both for her novel and essay, without ever recognising the incompatibility of facts and fiction. While in an ideal world antonyms would one day exist in harmony, perhaps even get married as long as the laws of grammar allowed that, the reluctance of a writer like Oyler in recognising this paradox, let alone accepting it explains why the luxury of outing one’s reality without needing to admit so, is so fantastical. You have everyone’s agency. Woohoo! I, too, have many eccentric friends. All of whom would make for great material in my writing. They would not be as entertaining if I simply retold their stories, matter-of-factly. I am tired of Oyler's demand that I sit before her for this long. But I suppose, what even can a reader do when a writer asks them to read their works?

Conclusion // You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain

The issue still, is that autofiction is cowardly. Imagine a random family gathering. Imagine around ten individuals in that gathering. Picture relatives who are visiting from abroad, chatting up the parents of Character A and Character B. Why do I bring family into this? Well, it is quite simple. Just humour me for a moment. A is five years younger than B. B is also finishing up their undergraduate degree. B is happy to chat about their experience at university with these older folks, who constantly interrogate them about their career prospects. B is also more than happy to entertain them by making up possible paths based on their time doing random clubs at university (which these relatives can never verify) which B is never really going to pursue. Cousin C is thoroughly entertained by B.

At the same time, A is painfully quiet due to their fear of not being able to lie about what they want to do. They are also quite unaware of what the future holds. So, they keep rambling about everything that they have done in school much to the displeasure and disappointment of these relatives and Cousin C. A is fiction. B is autobiography. C is autofiction. So what does C do when they go back home? They tell their friends exactly what B told them, but mixes it up with A’s details to make it more entertaining. Their friends love it. A does not care. B, however, B feels like they now cannot change how C’s friends perceive their actual history because it is suddenly not theirs anymore. If they tell them, C’s friends will never talk to C again. C makes the mistake of inviting B over one summer. What does B do? Well, they get drunk and spill all of C’s lies over a night out with their friends. C was alone thereafter.

Before you diagnose me with having family trauma, I must tell you that I am usually a fan of oxymorons. They amuse me. Phrases like pretty ugly, or stupidly genius, maybe even freakishly small. These are just some that people have used on me (although I refuse to elaborate on the last one). Terms which contrast each other are interesting to me. Autofiction is another such term. Clearly.

Batuman’s representation of autofiction is however, not something that I endorse. It tries to merge two genres as one very incompatibly. Sometimes separation is good. No one needs to play cupid all the time. You might be wondering: why has this man not spoken about Batuman in more detail in the concluding parts of his paper? I understand that, but we have already covered Batuman’s works thoroughly in the paper. We have had enough of her lives.

This is what I wish autofiction writers also understood. Especially Batuman. We get enough of their life through their autobiographies or even if they have not written one, we can get access to their life through that. There need not exist a work of fiction that supplements more details about it. The bitter truth that writers like Oyler seem to miss is that no one is as narcissistic as the writer themselves, and given that a work of autofiction only has one writer, most readers if not all do not care enough to investigate the parts of the writer that are now found within the text. I cared about Selin. Cared. Before she became real. Oyler, why would I care about you in a work of fiction? Batuman, it is not pulling from real life if your real life itself is the verbatim content of the novel.

The narcissism of autofiction is different from what these writers understand. In fact, it is not even exclusive to fiction because I would attribute the following quality to fiction itself. A work of fiction regularly initiates this awareness within the reader. It probes the “I” into the reading. The reader is left asking: How do I relate to this character? Why do I gravitate or do not gravitate towards this character’s narrative? Now, there is a chance that Batuman was ‘inspired’ by her interest in Russian literature and her undergraduate experience at Harvard to write both her ‘fictional’ novels, but the manner in which they were written deter them from being fictional. If the reader, who has the knowledge of her memoir like me, cannot find substantial difference between Selin’s life and Batuman’s, both her novels read like extended memoirs. I would even argue that The Possessed seems not to be a memoir on Elif Batuman, but Selin. Selin seems more real than Batuman, simply due to the detailed narrative of her life that the readers get.

My ultimate frustration with Batuman’s fiction is that, despite reading it, I am unable to carry with me any reminders of its fictionality. I lost all of my connection and relatability with Selin the moment I read the memoir. Am I to be blamed for reading her memoir? You cannot fault a reader for wanting to know more about the writer who gave them a relatable character, through their autobiography. Again, Oyler, if you are reading this, I would love to know more about you, the writer, via an autobiographical work.

Dear Elif Batuman, if the work is out there, it will be read. You cannot pretend that your memoir does not exist. So, really, all the time I spent reading your fictional novels is now wasted. I am still left in this neitherified state of not knowing what to believe.

A reader of fiction submits to reading a work with the intention of knowing to not believe in anything. They are not to be in this state of asking either/or when reading something. Do not confuse me. It has taken me a lot of time and effort to discern the relatable elements between Selin and I. It was of great pain to realise what parts of Selin exclusively belonged to Batuman. Almost all of it. Despite all the hours spent, I have no relatability with Selin anymore. It is fitting I suppose, because after all of this, it is I, the reader, who is revealed to be, the idiot.

Works Cited // I Didn’t Make It All Up

Batuman, Elif. Either/Or. Penguin Publishing Group, 2022.

Batuman, Elif. The Idiot: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.

Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel, vol. 1, 2006, pp. 336–63.

Homans, John. “Crack-up.” New York Magazine, 2006, https://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/15547/.

Jamal, Najwa. “Elif Batuman Answers Our Burning Questions About the State of the Novel.” The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/elif-batuman-interview/.

Larson, Thomas. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2007.

Mart, Cagri. “Reader-Response Theory and Literature Discussions: a Springboard for Exploring Literary Texts.” The New Educational Review, vol. 56, 2019, pp. 78-87.

Lipa, Dua. “IDGAF.” 2017

Oyler, Lauren. No Judgment: Essays. HarperCollins Publishers, 2024.

Sharma, Ashok. “Record monsoon rains in northern India kill more than 100 over 2 weeks.” Global News, https://globalnews.ca/news/9832157/india-monsoon-rains-deaths/.

Vaidyanathan, Gayathri. “How India is battling deadly rain storms as climate change bites.” Nature.