My mental health writing is straddling a line between memoir and fiction. Many people say that this is “professional suicide” for a writer. The example that they always give is A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. He got his butt kicked because he classified it as a memoir, which is non-fiction and must be 100% true. The literary world attacked him. My books are like his. So are many other great works of hybrid fiction, but the authors have escaped the wrath of Oprah and enjoy great critical praise. How did they do it?
I discovered the true genre of my largest body of literary fiction: Autofiction. This genre is without a doubt the correct one. My stories mix hallucinations, compound characters, and magical realism with fact. They cannot be memoir. Nor are they entirely fictional.
Luminaries of Autofiction include Charles Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, Bret Easton Ellis, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Marcel Proust. In short, my people.
It is a joy to discover that my body of work has a true classification, if not at a bookstore, then at least among literary critics. Yes, the books in my series are memoirs, but they are also fiction. They use literary devices reserved for the fantastic and the absurd, not the rigid rigor of non-fiction.