Review: NDA: An Autofiction Anthology edited by Caitlin Forst

Reviewed by J S Khan

Archway Editions. 2022. 204 pages.

Anthologies tend to be bulky, thanks—in large part—to their inclusion of lengthy introductions or other prefatory material. Often written by a self-effacing editor, and of an academic bend, this typical front material usually seeks to frame readers’ overall experience of the multiple texts its editors have bound in this one volume. Imagine then, my sense of relief and amusement on first opening NDA: An Autofiction Anthology to be published November 29, 2022. Not only does this particularly effective and excitingly diverse compilation weigh in at a mere 204 pages, but—on opening its first page—I could not help but smile when I saw only this brief, two-line Editor’s Note:

“Autofiction has recently been hit with moral, academic, and critical scrutiny.
I am not moral, academic, or a critic.”

While this pithy but provocative Editor’s Note may strike some readers as nothing more than a defiant sort of nose-thumbing—a flippant disavowal of responsibilities and expectations by NDA’s editor, Caitlin Forst—it remains highly impactful as constructed. After all, Forst provides us only two paragraphs, each of which contains only a single simple sentence with which to frame what’s to come. The first of these sentences establishes a consensus reality by way of an assumed contemporary reaction to the emergence of a relatively new genre—while the second immediately pivots to provide a personal perspective of that assumed consensus reality. After reading the entire anthology, I found myself returning to examine this “I” poised at the fulcrum of this Editor’s Note, unable to shake the feeling that Forst here is serving up—dare I say it?—her own sly form of autofiction.

Although “autofiction” as a term dates to the late 1970s, only in the last half-decade or so has its use penetrated beyond a small circle of critics and writers into popular discourse. As the natural portmanteau implies, “autofiction” refers to a genre that intentionally blends the more time-honored genres of fiction and autobiography—an effect typically achieved by an intentional blurring of lines between a text’s (fictional) narrator and (biographical) author, and often by way of overt metafictional reference to its author’s particular life-experience. No doubt, this recent interest in autofiction likely stems from something particular to the present moment, and at least this writer would suspect it has something to do with the internet, which has—over the last couple decades—restructured our primary social discourse in ways we cannot imagine. After all, the majority of us have grown only too familiar with navigating a hyperreal world via semi-fictious personae, or “online avatars,” and even cognitive science suggests that self-identification is not something essential to consciousness or merely the product of a social construction, but also—to some degree—a performance.

Regardless, when one considers the relatively recent buzz generated around autofiction, it seems inevitable someone would collect an anthology seeking to map and showcase the genre’s highly self-reflexive possibilities. In this vein, Forst has chosen an apt title with NDA, one that emphasizes what—in my mind—remains the genre’s most exciting and unique characteristic: that unspoken mutual contract between a writer of autofiction and their readers. After all, NDA is the commonly recognized shorthand for “non-disclosure agreement,” or a specific type of contract drawn up between two parties which enables the divulgence of confidential information while paradoxically establishing boundaries that restrict access to this same body of matter. Can one think of a better metaphor for the sort of calculated vulnerability necessary for the writing of autofiction, or the state of suspense in which a reader is left after reading a piece of autofiction, knowing that some of what they read is demonstrably true and yet—as a whole—must remain unverifiable in the public record? But, then again, does this same state of affairs not underlie all our interactions, both with others as well as our own selves? As the narrator of Chris Molnar’s “Radio Cure” tellingly reflects: “I remember it was difficult to seem serious unless I was funny too, as if I had to seem like I was hiding something to be sincere. She cared because I scared her, and she was scared because she cared, and both things were tied together by the joke.” It is this paradoxical space—between what we know to be true and what we must assume to be true—that NDA mines for its maximum effect.

NDA assembles fourteen autofictions all told, each written by a different author, many of whom maintain an active presence online and create visual art—including a couple “meme artists.” Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that many of the autofictions collected in NDA examine both one’s artistic productions and the internet as potential site of the self’s inscription. For instance, Elle Nash provides a beautifully bleak piece in “Livestream” (one that deserves to be read without synopsis), while Tao Lin’s “Canadian Gay Porn” depicts its eponymous narrator engaged in yet-another “gimmick” of shameless online self-promotion. Aiden Arata’s “Naming Things” provides readers a characteristically strong voice-driven piece, one which—beyond being funny and full of personality—effectively illustrates the necessity of simulating a surface in order to be seen, much less understood:

Exteriorizing my interiority has always been an obsession, even before the internet. To achieve this feels so elusive, like trying to tell someone an important dream you had, only to realize halfway through the story that it doesn’t make sense and they don’t care; the value of the vision is so intrinsic and slippery that when you try to say it, it’s just a series of useless clauses.

Ultimately, every single one of the autofictions anthologized in NDA takes advantage of the implicit “non-disclosure agreement” that lies at the heart of autofiction, not just to risk exposing the author’s own potentially banal actions and thoughts with a limited liability either, but also to examine the relationship between what we know to be true or false and how this can often be a slippery slope. Take B.R. Yeager’s “The Roman Soldier” for example, in which its narrator—after elaborating on some particularly self-damaging lies he tells about himself as a youth—remarks offhandedly: “People won’t keep you close out of love. But destroying yourself, letting others destroy you—it keeps them from hating you completely.”

While a majority of the autofictions in NDA depict relative acts of transgression—some criminal, some sexually deviant—several also work to push against the limits of what most people would recognize as autofiction in general. For instance, the first autofiction collected in NDA—written by Vi Khi Nao and titled “Field Notes on Suicide or the Inability to Commit Suicide or It’s Hard to Follow a Pomeranian Around”— unfolds in a highly poetic, non-linear fashion and contains an unexpected third-person narrator. The same can be said for the final piece as well, David Fishkind’s “The House on the Hill in the Country.” Yet another piece, Aritilde Kirby’s “Benzaiten,” depicts its narrator’s gender dysphoria and eventual transition by first framing the piece with a non-gendered first-person that then weaves between a “he” and “she” to effectively illustrate the complexities of self and the ways our sense of self remains, to some extent, fragmentary. Or, to quote Rimbaud, “I is another.”

And so—to return to the Editor’s Note—it seems clear to me that the “I” presented here by Forst does not represent a purely negative or antithetical stance, but rather one better characterized as apophatic—or suggestive of unknown possibilities. In other words, the “I” of this autofiction does not necessarily inhabit a stance that is radically anti-moral, anti-academic, or anti-critical, but instead positions readers for a more conceptual sort of aesthetic—one that, yes, bears the mark of its own highly self-reflexive inscription and one in which expectations are not just established, but also subverted.

J S Khan is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.