Autobiographical fiction

Autobiographical fiction transforms an author’s life and memories into invented narrative, changing or combining events and people rather than presenting them as literal autobiography.

Autofiction: Fiction that openly blurs the boundary between an author’s life and an invented narrative. This neighboring form makes the author’s identity and the work’s invention explicit in different ways.
Narrative voice: The voice through which a narrative is told. A first-person voice can resemble the author without establishing that narrator as the author.
David Copperfield: Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel following the life of its title character from childhood to adulthood. Dickens drew on experiences including factory work while reshaping them into a fictional life.
Autobiographical memory: Memory for events and experiences from one’s own life. The form depends on personal recollection, which is selective rather than a complete record.
Autobiography: A prose account of a person’s life written by that person. It presents life as the subject of a factual account, unlike transformed fictional narrative.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account is limited, biased, or misleading. Unreliability can unsettle assumptions that fictionalized memories reproduce events faithfully.
Sons and Lovers: D. H. Lawrence’s 1913 novel about a young man’s family life and relationships. Lawrence transformed his mining-family background into a novel centered on fictional characters.
Memory: The processes by which information and experience are encoded, retained, and recalled. Fictional transformation reflects how recollection changes and organizes the past.
Memoir: A nonfiction account focused on selected experiences or periods from an author’s life. Its claim to recount lived experience distinguishes it from fictional transformation.
Composite character: A fictional character formed by combining traits or experiences from multiple people. Combining real-life sources is one way fiction reshapes an author’s remembered relationships.

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