Between the Lines: The Rise of the Autofiction Boom by Namrata

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. In today’s column, she explores the rise of the auto-fiction boom and how it is blurring the lines between life and art.

Somewhere between the confessional and the crafted, between the diary and the novel, autofiction thrives. It’s not memoir. It’s not fully fiction. It is a shimmering space in which the author’s life is not just source material but narrative territory. a blurred mirror of truth and story, memory and imagination.

In recent years, autofiction has seen a remarkable surge globally and also quietly and potently within South Asian writing. At its core, autofiction reflects a discomfort with boundaries: between fact and fiction, but also between public and private, shame and revelation, vulnerability and performance.

This isn’t just about writers turning the lens on themselves. It’s about reclaiming the self as story, especially in cultures where silence around the personal, especially women’s personal, is almost sacred. The rise of autofiction in South Asian literature is not a trend. It’s a rupture. And a reckoning.

Writers like Madhuri Vijay, with The Far Field, layer intimate psychological journeys over a social landscape roiling with political tension. While it is framed as fiction, the narrative’s first-person confessional tone and deeply introspective voice feel unmistakably drawn from lived experience. Similarly, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North reads like a meditation more than a novel with its protagonist wandering through the war-scarred psyche of post-civil-war Sri Lanka in ways that often feel like the writer’s own processing.