Fictive autobiography definition memoir

There is a lot of ambiguity in story-telling, including in the very definition of what constitutes a story or for that matter, a novel or novella. Is it the length, the subject matter, the structure? These questions can become contentious; for example, in a course about the novella that I took during my MFA, my classmates, professor and I once had a half-hour argument about whether novellas are just long short stories, or whether they have some other ephemeral quality that sets them apart.

Settle any of those parameters—say length—and quickly you find exceptions e. For sale: baby shoes, never worn. And can fiction really be all made up, or is all writing inherently autobiographical, given that it is the result of a single consciousness and a single individual's set of experiences?

Fictional autobiography meaning

How much can you draw from real life and still call it fiction? How much can you invent and still call it memoir? And most importantly, are these labels necessary or important to telling a good story? To complicate all of this, there is a new kid on the playground, kicking up sand and refusing to pick a side: auto-fiction. Instead, she philosophizes when she wants; she asks long series of questions and uses coin flips to answer them; she inserts pictures of her own apartment and of a tarot reading.