Sarah Crown posted an interesting bit in The Guardian’s books blog, “Is auto-fiction strictly a boys’ game?” The subject was the phenomenon of authors who insert a character bearing their name into their work. It turns out that a number of books—both new and not so new—have used this device, a fact that interested me greatly, as I used it in my novel, Pixels of Young Mueller. I have compiled this list of books from the article:
- Jonathan Coe (The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim)
- Damon Galgut (In a Strange Room)
- Geoff Dyer (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi)
- Will Self (Will Self Walking to Hollywood)
- Michel Houellebecq (La Carte et le Territoire)
- Alberto Manguel (All Men Are Liars)
- Philip Roth (Operation Shylock)
- Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated)
- E. L. Doctorow (World’s Fair)
- Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes)
- Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin)
- Amelie Nothomb (Une forme de vie)
- Gertrude Stein (Autobiography of Alice B Toklas)
Readers familiar with my novel know that its main character, Klaus Mueller, creates a fictional character named Jerry Schwartz. I knew that I could not have been the first to do this, but I was not aware of any specific instances in which it had been done. Fortunately, Sarah Crown has come to the rescue, and while I don’t agree with her use of “auto-fiction” to describe the literary device itself, I applaud her efforts.