Dear Tina,

Your column arrived at just the right time. My first book was recently accepted for publication—thanks in part to book inc and Project Write Now’s excellent classes—and I’m unsure how to describe its genre. At first, I told the publisher it was creative nonfiction. Then I reconsidered and called it autofiction, or autobiographical fiction. Now I’m wondering whether “fiction based on life experience” is more accurate. I’m not sure how the book will ultimately be categorized, and as a new writer, I’m hesitant to keep asking the publisher questions that might reveal my uncertainty. Still, I don’t know what to call it.

The project began as a memoir. It was long, but the section I found most compelling focused on my decade as an exhibition designer at The New York Public Library in the 1980s and 1990s. In memoir form, though, the story felt weighed down by facts. Rewriting it as fiction gave me more freedom, while still allowing me to stay true to the exhibitions and the behind-the-scenes situations surrounding them. I kept many of the real staff members, though I changed their names, and I allowed myself more flexibility with the timeline. In the end, the fictional version felt closer to the emotional truth of the experience.

Even so, I still stumble when asked about the genre. Do you have any suggestions?

Signed,

Genre Challenged

Dear Genre Challenged,

Congratulations on your upcoming publication! 

While reading about your book, I couldn’t help but think of All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley as a basis for comparison. The author, a former guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, weaves a decade of work experience and art history into his story of love and loss. 

I would imagine the author faced some of the same struggles you did in writing about your time with the library – or maybe that any writer faces: so many facts and people and chronology…what to keep, what to weed out. When I look up his book, I find it tagged under a number of categories, such as “Adult Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Personal Memoir.” 

Those categories are relevant, but I’m not sure they point to a clear genre. Maybe the real reason genre is so important is marketing: to direct potential readers to the place they want to go. For that reason, I suspect your publicist has already arrived at a genre, but it’s an interesting question, so let’s do a deeper dive. 

You are clear about fictionalizing your story, so there’s no mistaking it for a memoir at least. The bending of facts disqualifies it for the creative nonfiction category, too. The rest of the debate seems a bit semantical to me. I think it clearly falls into autofiction (autobiographical fiction), which seems like a more succinct way of saying “fiction based on life experience.” I suppose you might be wrestling with the genre because you (and only you) know how much of the book is fact and how much is fiction. That balance seems like the crux of the question. It’s safe to say that most fiction is either based on or has aspects of an author’s lived experience; yet, you set out to write a memoir first, so perhaps the ratio of fact to fiction puts it firmly in the autofiction camp.

But alas, autofiction is not an official genre. Who knew?

According to Brooke Warner’s post in Publisher’s Weekly, the term autofiction might be a helpful descriptor, but it “is not and has never been a genre.” She offers the Book Industry Study Group as a good place to seek guidance, so you may want to visit the BISAC website. Perhaps your book might be classified generally as fiction…although that doesn’t seem to do it justice. 

Maybe there’s a compromise: for conversation with others, feel free to label your book whatever you want and let the publisher figure out which official genre it officially belongs to. 

And remember, readers don’t necessarily care about genre once we’re hooked. For example, I’m late to the Ocean Vuong party and just started reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a poetry-memoir hybrid. It is so engrossing and beautifully written I could give a hoot what genre it falls into. 

Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful, Genre Challenged, but I think your question highlights a modern conundrum of trying to fit an ever-changing landscape of written expression into the confines of a one-size fits all genre. 

However your book gets classified, I look forward to reading it! Thanks for the shout-out to Project Write Now’s writing classes and programs. Please keep us updated with release dates and purchase options for your upcoming book. 

Do you have a writing-related dilemma? Send your questions to asktina@projectwritenow.org. Selected questions will be featured in upcoming columns, and Tina will ensure her answers offer valuable insights for writers facing similar challenges.