Real or Fake? Autofiction and The Hills
I started talking about The Hills, firstly, because, as I mentioned, the theme tune comes to mind when I’m asked about autofiction, which I recently was, yet again (“Staring at the blank page before you / Open up the dirty window / Let the sun illuminate…”), but also to demonstrate how it so casually and unapologetically did something the world of contemporary literature is struggling to get its head around, even now. In an age when the artists, the leading intellectuals, the people who are supposed to be at the forefront of avant-garde thought and experimentalism, whatever the hell that might be these days (sitting in a large room and holding eye-contact with people? Not using full stops? Taking drugs?), are clamouring about definitions between fiction, autofiction, and fact, The Hills managed to blur the lines entirely between fact and fiction, and to do so in a way that proved genuinely exciting, without having to have endless debates over what it actually was.
Lucy Sweeney Byrne reflects on the intersection between The Hills and autofiction.
3:AM in Lockdown 54: Ed Luker
The Man Who Shook Hands with Everyone; A Myth From the Future By Ed Luker. The year is 2183. A child sits reading from their pad, breathing through an oxygen mask. Through the window is a barren planet. The child raises its eyes from the pad and turns to its carer: ‘What’s handshaking mum?’ The […]
LOTE: an extract
What was beyond doubt by the time I got back was that a new Transfixion had arrived in the form of Hermia Druitt, the woman in this photograph. This was confirmed by the sensations: flashes from Arcadia. Moonlight, of a kind, sighed up and down the tube of my spine, but above all, that indescribable note which accompanied all my Transfixions was present: humming beneath the high fine rush–probably not dissimilar to holy rapture–was an almost violent familiarity.
An extract from the novel LOTE by Shola von Reinhold.