Between the Lines: On Autofiction

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she reflects on autofiction in South Asian writing, with its uneasy intimacies and refusals.

There is a kind of writing that does not begin with the confidence of invention, nor with the assurance of recollection, but with a return to how it continues to live within the body. It does not seek to stabilise memory into narrative, nor to distance it into fiction. Instead, it moves in a space where the act of remembering is already an act of shaping, where the self that writes and the self that is written cannot be cleanly separated, and where what matters is not the accuracy of detail so much as the persistence of feeling. This is the uneasy terrain autofiction occupies, though it rarely announces itself as such. It unfolds slowly, often hesitantly, allowing contradiction and incompleteness to remain visible rather than resolved.

In South Asian writing, this hesitation carries a particular weight. The self here is never singular, never detached from the histories that constitute it. To write I is to write through layers of inheritance of caste, language, migration, and gendered expectations that do not recede simply because the narrative turns inward. If anything, they become more insistent. This is why the recent turn toward autofiction across South Asian literatures feels less like a borrowed form and more like an inevitable pressure, a need to find a way of writing experience that does not force it into coherence too quickly, that allows the self to remain porous, unsettled, in conversation with forces that exceed it.

What this staying-with looks like varies across texts, but it often reveals itself in a certain refusal of narrative neatness. In The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy, the act of narration itself becomes unstable, interrupted by the author’s own questioning of how stories can or should be told. The text does not allow the reader to forget that it is being constructed, that history is being mediated through a voice that is uncertain, self-aware, and unwilling to disappear behind the narrative. Something similar, though more interior, unfolds in Trial by Silence by Perumal Murugan (Translated by Anirudh Vasudevan), where the aftermath of social rupture is not dramatised so much as absorbed into the rhythms of a life that continues under scrutiny. The self here is not expressive in any overt sense; it is constrained, watched, and shaped by forces that exceed it, and yet it persists, quietly, in its attempt to make sense of what has been lived.

This quiet persistence is also what gives autofiction its particular emotional texture. It does not move quickly. It allows repetition, hesitation, and return. In Odysseus Abroad, the narrative seems to drift through observation and recollection, less concerned with what happens than with how the mind moves through what has happened. The self that emerges is not fixed but continually adjusting, thinking, and revising. In Narcopolis, the porousness between lived experience and fiction creates a voice that feels both intimate and elusive, anchored in a specific world and yet resistant to being reduced to documentation. These are not texts that declare themselves as autofiction, but they share its sensibility—a commitment to interiority that does not seek to resolve itself into clarity.

If autofiction often turns inward, it does not always do so through a clearly bounded, declarative self. In some South Asian texts, the I disperses, becoming less a voice than a presence felt across a social landscape. The Prisons We Broke by Baby Kamble (Translated from the Marathi by Maya Pandit ) makes this dispersal explicit, where the individual life cannot be separated from the collective experience of caste, labour, and survival, the self emerging only in relation to a larger, shared history. Something quieter but no less significant unfolds in Ladies’ Tailor by Priya Hajela, where identity is not articulated through introspection but assembled through interaction, the rhythms of work, the intimacy of measurement, and the small negotiations of everyday life in a tightly knit community. The narrative does not announce its proximity to lived experience, yet it carries the weight of observation that feels gathered rather than invented. In this sense, it extends the possibilities of autofiction, suggesting that the self need not always be confessed or centred to be present; it can exist diffusely, shaped by others, emerging in fragments across a world that refuses to hold still long enough to be narrated from a single point of view.

This negotiation becomes particularly visible in writing that moves across geographies. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the narrative voice performs itself in real time, addressing an unseen listener, shaping its own story even as it tells it. The self here is acutely aware of how it is being perceived, how it must narrate itself within a global framework that is already laden with expectation and suspicion. A similar awareness of displacement and interior fracture runs through Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam, where memory, migration, and belonging create a landscape in which the self is continually negotiating its place. In A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee, identity becomes something that must be constructed and concealed at once, shaped by desire as much as by the fear of exposure.

Even in works that do not sit squarely within autofiction, there is often a gravitational pull toward its concerns. Island of a Thousand Mirrors moves through the personal and the political with an attentiveness to how history inhabits individual lives, while The Lives of Others situates the self within a dense network of family and ideology, refusing to isolate interior experience from the structures that shape it. In Eating Wasps, the fragmentation of women’s interior lives gestures toward selves that are rarely allowed coherence, their stories unfolding in ways that resist singular narration.

And yet, the rise of autofiction is not without its disquiet. There is a persistent question that shadows the form: what does it mean to centre the self at a time when the self is already so relentlessly foregrounded? In an era of constant self-narration, where lives are curated and performed across digital spaces, autofiction risks being read as an extension of this impulse, another way of shaping how one is seen. The distinction between lived experience and its aesthetic rendering becomes increasingly difficult to trace, raising the possibility that the form might slide into a kind of stylised self-consciousness, where the act of writing becomes inseparable from the act of self-presentation.

This is where the form demands a certain vigilance from both writer and reader. Not all writing that draws from the self is equally attentive to what it reveals or obscures. There is always the danger that proximity is mistaken for depth, that the mere fact of lived experience is taken to be sufficient without the labour of reflection that gives it meaning. In the South Asian context, this concern is further complicated by the uneven distribution of voice. The ability to write oneself into the centre of a narrative, to assume that one’s interior life will be read with care, is not equally available to all. Autofiction, for some, is a space of exploration; for others, it remains fraught, shaped by the knowledge that the self will be read not as singular but as representative.

What, then, does autofiction ask of the reader? Perhaps, first, a relinquishing of certainty. The impulse to verify, to align the narrative with the author’s life, can obscure what the text is doing. Autofiction does not offer truth as something to be extracted; it offers it as something to be encountered in process, in the movement of thought, in the hesitations and returns that structure the narrative. It asks the reader to stay with ambiguity, to accept that what is being presented is neither wholly factual nor entirely invented, but something that draws its power precisely from that instability.

It also asks for a different kind of attention that is willing to slow down, notice repetition, and sit with the silence. These texts do not always announce their significance. They accumulate it. They allow meaning to emerge gradually, often in ways that resist easy articulation. To read them well is to resist the urge to resolve them too quickly, to allow the self on the page to remain as unsettled as it is.

What autofiction ultimately unsettles is not simply the distinction between fiction and reality, but the expectation that a life, once written, will yield itself to understanding. These texts resist that expectation with a quiet persistence. They do not gather experience into something conclusive, nor do they offer the reassurance of distance to the reader. Instead, they remain within the act of thinking itself, allowing memory to surface unevenly, allowing contradiction to remain without being resolved, allowing the self to appear not as a stable centre but as something continually adjusting to what it encounters.

In this, there is a different kind of fidelity at work to process. The writing does not attempt to fix experience in place; it attends to how experience shifts each time it is returned to, how it acquires new meanings, loses others, and resists being held in a single frame. What is offered is not a life explained, but a life being worked through, sentence by sentence, hesitation by hesitation.

To read such writing is to recognise that understanding does not always arrive as clarity.

It emerges slowly, often incompletely, shaped by what remains unsaid as much as by what is articulated. The self that takes form on the page is never finished. It remains provisional, marked by the very act of trying to know itself. And perhaps that is where autofiction finds its quiet endurance, in staying with it long enough for its uncertainties to become visible, and in trusting that this visibility, however partial, is enough.

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