If you look in a bookstore for Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume series My Struggle—Book Five of which was released by Archipelago today—you’ll probably find it shelved under “Fiction.” But it’s narrated in the first-person by a man named Karl Ove, whose life bears striking resemblance to the biographical Knausgaard’s. The genre known as “autofiction” seems to be a growing trend in today’s publishing industry, between Knausgaard and peers like Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner. But autofiction, coined in 1977 by French novelist Serge Doubrovsky, has a long and rich literary history. If you’re looking for precursors—some lightly fictionalized memoir, others only loosely based on the author’s life—here are 14 places to start.
1. Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard (written 1835–36; published 1890)
2. Colette, the Claudine series (Claudine at School; Claudine in Paris; Claudine Married; Claudine and Annie) (1900–1904)
3. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1871–1922)
4. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
5. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
6. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (1944)
7. James Baldwin, Go Tell it On the Mountain (1953)
8. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979)
9. Marguerite Duras, The Lover (1984)
10. Herve Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save my Life (1991)
11. Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997)
12. Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)
13. J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2007)
14. Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)
