#autofiction

[amicus-noctis]

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle 1

Painting: "The Patient" by Vasily Polenov

[d-m-nagu]

Fiftyfifty: Male (2024), paper collage, 22x22,5cm

Paper Works

[compressednerve]

[{co-consciousness}]

||a state in which two or more alters are present in or using the body at once or are aware of the outside world simultaneously.||

[esarkaye]

"More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."

—Saint Teresa

[thescrewballsociety]

the screwball society invites you to submit...

☻ essays

☻ creative/literary nonfiction

☻ autofiction

☻ interviews

☻ critiques

☻ book, music, and film reviews

and all of the snippets of your life and mind you've previously kept hidden in the back of your sock drawer. we love the gritty and morbid. the bright and colorful. the odd and angsty. the embarrassing and uncool. give us your sludge and slime and shame. we'll publish it on our substack blog and share your work with the world.

for more details, visit our submission guidelines.

questions? contact us via this blog or by emailing thesubstacksociety@gmail.com.

[gregor-samsung]

" Vengo invitato come relatore a un convegno di tre giorni a Torino, un workshop internazionale con decine di partecipanti. Non conosco nessuno di questi colleghi, ma apprezzo la circostanza di un ambiente del tutto nuovo e di gente mai vista. S. è morto da sei mesi. Al ristorante dell’albergo dove si svolge il convegno i posti non sono assegnati e alla prima pausa per il pranzo mi ritrovo a dividere il tavolo con un relatore olandese, un afroamericano di Miami, una canadese, un belga, una brasiliana e un altro italiano, di Roma. L’imbarazzo iniziale dura poco, ci troviamo a discorrere come se ci conoscessimo da mesi, amici di lunga data. La casualità che ci ha riunito allo stesso tavolo si trasforma all’istante in un legame. Finiamo per trascorrere insieme il resto di questi tre giorni. Il convegno, i pranzi, le cene, le serate fuori a bere nei bar della città. Essere sconosciuto fra sconosciuti è rilassante, l’atmosfera di unità che si è venuta a creare fra noi, destinata a durare una finestra di tempo così limitata, ha qualcosa di magico. Ognuno di noi lo riconosce.

L’ultima notte del convegno faccio un sogno eccezionale. Sono in un enorme luna-park e mi aggiro incuriosito fra le diverse attrazioni. Giungo a una giostra composta da una ruota orizzontale alla quale sono agganciate una serie di seggioline a due posti. Decido di salire e ne occupo una da solo. La giostra si mette in moto e dapprima gira piano, poi acquista velocità e comincia a piacermi parecchio. Anzi, mi dico che era tanto che non salivo su un’attrazione del genere e che avevo dimenticato quanto potessero essere divertenti. La velocità del carosello si fa vertiginosa, ormai non riesco neppure a intravedere i volti degli occupanti degli altri seggiolini, è tutto troppo frenetico e confuso, ma questa folle velocità invece di preoccuparmi mi fa ridere fino alle lacrime. Poi il mio seggiolino si stacca dal resto della giostra e comincia a schizzare verso il cielo. Non provo alcuna paura, al contrario ne sono estasiato. Sto volando incontro al cielo, il vento nei capelli, la terra che si allontana sotto di me, sto compiendo un viaggio imprevedibile ed è una sensazione stupenda. Con un’improvvisa intuizione razionale mi rendo conto che sono felice, felice come non ero da mesi. Ed è a quel punto che accade: sento la voce di S. al mio fianco, che nell’orecchio mi sussurra: “Questa felicità è il mio regalo. Buon compleanno”. Mi risveglio all’istante. È la mattina del 18 aprile: me ne ero dimenticato, ma è il mio compleanno.

Questa felicità è il mio regalo. A oggi è il sogno più bello che abbia mai fatto. "

Matteo B. Bianchi, La vita di chi resta, Mondadori, 2023¹; pp. 144-145.

[chiwi-la-capybara]

Looking for a beta

I am writing a full length novel. I am looking for someone to read the first couple chapters and just say honestly whether they would feel interested in reading more, and whether the writing style works or it reads too much like a diary.

The novel is autofiction. I fell in love with my professor in college. He never realized but we ended up having a weirdly intimate relationship during that time. Some fucked up stuff happened. This is a psychological novel meant to have elements of romance, comedy, and horror.

[loneberry]

The harrowing beauty and brevity of these books and their apparent simplicity disguised somewhat the punishing cost of their honesty. Never had I seen the supposed freedom — the “narcissism,” as we now like to call it — of self-examination so exposed in its brutality. Ernaux grasped the depths of isolation and loss she would need to descend to in order to retrieve the original reality of her being. Her art bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience; on the contrary, it is almost a self-violation.

—Rachel Cusk on the work or Annie Ernaux

[odettecarotte]

'As far as Nelson is concerned, the issue is one of expectation and conventionality. “For people who don’t necessarily read what [her friend the artist and poet] Wayne Koestenbaum calls ‘philosophically smeared literature about the body’ – which is what I generally perceive myself as having been involved with for the past 30-plus years – this may come as a shock or a revelation, or I may seem brave. But this wasn’t something new to me.”

As she’s keen to remind me, there’s a whole canon of this work out there, and they’re the writers and artists who’ve shaped her thinking. Like Love is bookended by interviews with two of the most important: the aforementioned Koestenbaum, and the poet Eileen Myles. But it’s also a subject on which Nelson touches in an essay about the work of the French writer Hervé Guibert, a pioneer of auto­fiction who wrote about the ravages of Aids. “People read him,” she says, “and they say, ‘Wow! You really wrote to shock the bourgeoisie!’ No – he’s telling you about a culture that’s his life. You think it’s this other thing because that’s the only way you can see it.”'

--Lucy Scholes interview with Maggie Nelson

I'm rereading The Argonauts in preparation for moving in with the love of my life.

Looking up reviews of the book, I'm disappointed to see people with septum rings say that Nelson is trying to shock the readers by starting her book with a scene of anal sex. This isn't a cheap attention grab; it's clearly Nelson's way of making sense of the world.

To me, her descriptions of sex, shit, blood and colostrum are matter of fact.

Love the phrase "philosophically smeared literature about the body." I'm very taken with Northrop Frye's notion of "anatomical fiction" and this is part of that lineage.

Pics of me wearing various extravagant outfits for the fun of it

One of my FAVORITE parts of Femme culture is playing dress up. I love that our gatherings are places where we can wear our most silly, risky, extravagant outfits, safe in the expectation that we'll be seen and appreciated but not harassed. I want the ability to wear a carefully constructed, aesthetically BOMB slutty outfit and have queers coo "your tits look amazing!" and perhaps also notice how my choice of perfume enhances the vibe. And I want to appreciate and ask questions about what they're wearing in turn.

Wearing clothing is a social exercise! This is my desired relation.

My clothing has a lot of meaning to me. Unfortunately strangers who are straight men erase the complexity into "see boobs, must dominate so other men will know I have power." Instead of appreciating, they immediately take ACTION, a stupid wolf whistle, the same action they'd do for any creature with curves.

I want my body to be a matter of fact, that other people can engage with, not a singular call to action.

There's something similar to me in Maggie's self-exposé. IMHO she's writing to and for a queer community so we can all better know our full selves. There is so much deep and complex social and philosophical meaning to what people do with our bodies. We should be opening these actions up, and asking more questions. It disappoints me when readers ignore the complexity and defensively assert that they're being manipulated into giving the author "attention."

[fairest]

AGAINST AUTOTHEORY aka THEORY TEXT AS WILLING DILDO

As this confluence with autofiction illustrates, the reduction of theory’s mediations down to amiable oozing incorporates the niche of academic knowledge production into the booming personalist genre industry. Moreover, autotheory comports as dexterous academic labor, projecting a fantasy that courting extra-mural audiences can make up for downsizing in the intellectual professions. Its vulnerability enkindles senior academics bored of theory’s many funerals, imagining eager readerships in a great beyond, and ignites younger academics searching for openings in an economic and professional landscape of foreboding foreclosure; its elasticity bodes a space for young academics to create work and find recognition even though the university as an institution has largely expelled them. Gigification of academic labor crams academic production: manifest your individual take in your individual style with this short-term teaching contract here, this Substack subscriber there. In this way, autotheory must be seen as efflux of a context in which theorists with fair labor conditions like tenure encounter their dire lack of peer audience, and theorists without fair labor conditions hustle for crossover appeal to eke out a living.

Aphoristic form props many of these texts thanks to its elliptical dance of vaporescence and glut, simultaneously pausing and flowing, at once crystal and aporia, snubbing and solicitous. They disrupt linearity, argumentative progression, and academic citation, boarding tiny theses absent plodding hallways. Pushing prose poems like other writers in the literary milieu, these genre melds are charming, accessible. We are drawn out of the realm of abstraction and solicited into a lyrical presence, a seductive proximity that subtracts the medium of theory’s abstractions and generalizations, achieving immersion. Reclining into life-writing, recoiling from argumentation, such retreats attain great resonance and beauty even as they whittle away theory’s distinct value, and recode theoretical knowing from revelatory to idiosyncratic. Immediatist theories posit a smooth continuum of body–experience–knowledge; bolster reflexive, passionate attachments as more legitimate than reason; refuse “symptomatic reading” in order to immanentize content. “It is what it is,” immediacy theory incants.

Such frolicking provocative insurgence of sensuous stimulation against linguistic or conceptual sense erects the theory text as willing dildo. It is bold in its shedding of academic composure, compelling in its self-disclosure, and titillating in its seductive posture—although decidedly unsexy. These are acute and perhaps even vulnerable performances, insuring in advance that assessing them critically would amount to some kind of mean violation—and that seems indeed to be the very point: to be so effulgently bare and corporeally vivid as to preclude distance-taking or concept-making. Immediacy as the unambiguous transmission of affect from author to reader, autonomic responses imagined untainted by the symbolic.

— Anna Kornbluh, from Immediacy

[ohwhataniight]

How a perfume helped me reconstruct my grandmother

A couple of months after my grandma died, my aunt had told me I could pick anything I wanted from her closet. I chose a bottle of the L’Oreal Elnette hairspray she always used to wear, a Playmobil figure she kept that had once belonged to me, and a small bottle of perfume I had never seen her wearing. I hid everything in a drawer next to my bed and only came to intentionally smell the perfume last night, after deciding to write about perfumes. The perfume was Anais Anais by Cacharel.

I rediscovered my grandmother, Stella, only when I finally found Anais Anais. Not that I had ever smelt it on her (Mum thinks it must have been a gift she kept, the bottle was almost full). It just managed very well to capture her essence. (Whoever bought that gift must have been either very insightful and familiar with my grandmother’s psyche, or merely very lucky in blind-buying a perfume that was en vogue in the late 70s).

Before spritzing Anais Anais on my wrist, I half-expected it to smell like roses. My brain was probably paying tribute to the memory of my grandmother cutting pink roses from her balcony and placing them in glasses full of water, on my desk while I was studying for uni. I do not recall the scent of those roses.

Instead, Anais Anais smelt old. Not in a bad way. Just stuck in time. Like someone who had died but whom I craved to meet, peering through dusty chests full of dresses and hand-knitted jumpers wrapped in a cloud of naphthaline. I eagerly greeted my grandmother’s elegance in the room, her poise, the sternness of her mothering, the grace with which she smiled. I heard the voice in which she called me “sweet doll”, the voice in which she admitted, a week before her second stroke, that although I made her proud, she still grieved over the disappointment of my atheism. “You have strayed from God’s path. That is my only woe”.

It was the incense, combined with the elegance and doe-eyed romance of the iris and hyacinth. My grandmother wasn’t just a devout Christian - she was a fanatical one. Jesus Christ was the love to which she gave herself most freely, the shelter she sought when earthly affairs became unbearable. Based on my own spiritual experiences, I can only compare it to literary ecstasy, to the orgasmic feeling that comes when someone does something human-like and I relate to them, to the grappling with the all-crushing fist of falling in love.

In Orthodox Greece, before Holy Friday when the burial of Christ takes place, a wooden construction upon which His body is lain, Επιτάφιος, is decorated with spring flowers and sprinkled with rose water. During the litany, four men carry the fragrant coffin on their shoulders and lead a procession to the streets. In Anais Anais I smell the church on the day of the Επιτάφιος. I’m still seven years old, sitting next to grandma who’s whispering - reading out of a pocket Bible synopsis she’s holding in her wrinkled hands. I suddenly see my grandmother younger, wearing pearls and clean cashmere in the colour of lilacs, sitting in a wallpapered living room, writing Easter cards for friends and family as my grandpa reads his newspaper. Like the one she worshipped, my grandma is ressurrected, if I'm allowed the blasphemy.

I spray Anais Anais on my chest, and spend the evening sitting next to you, watching Leftovers on the computer, with my jumper (Dad’s jumper, actually) stretched over my nose. I inhale deeply. I remember the monarch butterfly that once made its way into the one-room apartment of my mid-twenties. I remember the shame, the guilt, the dew, the devotion. Smelling a perfume that my grandma rarely wore, I become her image, I breathe in her sighs, I choke on her laughter. I reconstruct her.

[d-m-nagu]

Fiftyfifty: Female (2024), paper collage, 18x22,5cm

Paper Works

[compressednerve]

Tim Wright hotboxes his car in the parking lot of one of the motels and they're room is down a long corridor and a flight of stairs and it's Friday night so it's weirdly busy and social convention in a conservative small town demands that Stinky schizoaffective stoners keep it, largely to themselves,. So there is a lot of staring. And he's wearing his pajama pants and no binder so his godDamn boobs are jiggling massively around because he just wanted to step out of the claustrophobic Hotel Room for a half hour and get stoned. Because he's nice enough not to smoke in the room (read: he doesn't want to pay a $500 fee). But that consideration doesn't spare him from the ire of. Blonde people.

Bonus Jam moment: Tim i's holding Jay's hand in a death grip and pulling him in the direction he Thinks they should go but Jay is also squeezing Tim's hand and tugging desperately and he's mouthbreathing because he has post nasal drip and Tim is. Trying. to breathe through his nose. They're not sure who's pulling who in what direction. But thank God they made it to the elevator and there wasn't any blonde people there. This time.

∆(authors note: the Stank Ass pajama pants are from middle school.)

[princessbabygirlforever]

An older trans woman once told me that she sits to pee, which occasionally results in her peeing on herself, because that’s how hard she’s worked to block out the fact that she’s still retained her original organ all of these years. That’s what girls do: we deal in affect–feelings, vibes, emotions, moods—to counteract dissonance. If you feel like a girl, you are a girl. Serving cunt is the law of assumption. Pussy-stunting is a mindset. Delusion is a lifestyle. And dissociation is effortless, unselfconscious, easy.

After white men, only white women and girls are afforded an unstudied ease, a universalizing, pedestalizing canvas-like blankness free of aesthetic assumptions, charged with authority and unburdened by race and gender. The rest of us are seen as open wounds. I used to try to fight how I am perceived by feigning a sense of aloofness, insouciance and smallness. I did so by tucking my hair behind my ear, wistfully, longingly staring off into the distance, dissociating from my body to temporarily transport to a place where I could write like a white girl.

I would conjure the white girl vibe instantaneously when I’d listen to music, especially if the music I am listening to is really loud, almost dulling my other senses and causing me to feel what can only be described as the opposite of embodied: void-like. There, I could exist as an empty, diaphanous vessel unfilled by anything at all. There’s no burden of “identity” in the club or the bedroom or the hammam or the garden or online as the avatar of your choosing–anywhere deemed a feminine space worth inhabiting. Online, especially, is where anyone can lay down their burdens—the thick coating of class and race, geography and gender–and escape the indignities of womanhood, blackness, otherness. No fat…no trauma…no spiritual heaviness…no intensity…only purity. A blank canvas no one can ascribe assumptions and project onto. You’re the default player in the game. A babygirl.

As a terminally concerned girl teeming with big, electrical emotions, presenting myself as an open wound–where the id is steering the ship despite societal expectations and pressures to the contrary to flatten and suppress– has never quite appealed to me because I know it doesn’t appeal much to anyone else. I think of myself in relation to others, in a sort of triangulation with the world. I don’t want to be a spectacle, if I can help it, because I know I already am, that there is an audience baked into my experience, mercilessly ascribing the same assumptions to me that they would someone engaging with hallucinations on a city bus. On a city bus, to witness someone mumbling to themselves, smiling exuberantly, screaming, singing terribly or sobbing loudly in public, is to have a front row seat to an undesired excess, intensity and earnestness. That person has unconsciously chosen to present themselves, to the subtly disciplinary gaze of surveilling strangers, like a spectacle to be gawked at. They’ve interrupted the homogenizing edicts of polite society in a manner considered vulnerable, neurotic, unusual, boundaryless, histrionic, unrefined, unserious, grotesque, eccentric, amoral, out of control, shameless and cringe-worthy. Their vivid displays of animatedness, too gauche for “normal” sensibilities, so we’d rather tuck them away like an unsightly pile of rags on the floor, undermining them like we do our own id in the company of others.

This image is commonly associated with the mentally ill and the homeless, whom the public bodies and perceptions of are heavily policed and politicized. States of animatedness, of excess, are also racialized and gendered. Femininity and blackness, its sincerest expressions, deemed maximalist, evidence of effort, and therefore, failure. Too much.

To transcend our animatedness, we must turn our disciplining gaze to ourselves, self-effacing to make space for whiteness and maleness, totally erase ourselves. This palimpsestic quality is achieved through minimalist attire (no garish, colorful clothes re: avant basic), eliminating girlish and black vocal tics, adapting middlebrow tastes, writing in 3rd person, muting one’s melanated state with black and white photography, aspirational thinness so there is less of you, and an attitude that communicates aloofness so severe that you don’t even care about yourself.

These attempts at minimization, of disciplining your public animated body, will allow you to enjoy a certain remove from the wider world. You’ll be cured, no longer teeming with niggerishness and schlepping the mantle of womanhood into every room you walk into for the rest of your life. You’ll be the babygirl again, who you were before you ever knew that you occupy a subordinate role in society, and before you were privy to the myths and ideologies that have been created around your image and identity.

Like a princess, your girlhood and daughterhood had a sense of prestige, making the fact of your consanguinity almost secondary, except as a matter of differentiation from the masses of non-princesses. There wasn’t yet a force larger than life requiring self-minimization as a necessary boon. You were presumed to be a pure, guileless blank canvas of a girl. You didn’t have to arm yourself with knowledge of that—or any truth—to feel a claim to safety and purity because the fact of it was informed by your singularity.

The babygirl, elegantly inert and slow, never had to run outside of the context of a freewheeling and uninterrupted playtime. She was never embarrassed into velocity. She never had to be strong or work hard. She’s never had to learn to self-preserve because her existence hadn’t called for that skill set. Self-preservation is the ministry of wounded girls. The babygirl has never been wounded.

The babygirl is light, buoyant with a feeling she belongs right where she is. She’s preternaturally interested and keenly aware, with an insatiable attention and curiosity for entertainment, her commodities, the objects in her bedroom. She prefers living in a rapt state, the romantic eye of her mind transporting her from her present surroundings and the inherent ennui of girlhood into her imagination.

The babygirl’s emotions don’t give the appearance of an overflowing volcano of lava curdling into evidence of effort and maintenance and failure and toxicity, clumps for other people to step over, ignore, forget, apply a disciplining gaze to. She is like the waves in the ocean crashing freely into each other, free to express the gamut of her emotions, whether sad, irritable, annoyed or enraged, without it sweeping up the rest of her image and identity until there’s nothing left of her but her feelings, in the unforgiving, cynical eyes of the strangers she will meet in the world who will, inevitably, only see animatedness.

What makes me a babygirl–and what unifies me with all the other babygirls online who’re so hotly debated and contested and disbelieved–is our sensitivity and an unrelenting over-identification with objects and other people. Babygirls are committed to the aesthetic reading and viewing of still images, films and the internet, which informs a girly canon of derealization ephemera not intended to be over-identified with: antiheroines, dreams, the moon, theory, book spines, social outcasts, fonts, hysterical and ribald women, “invalid” women who live in their beds, dolls, numbers, voids, the color pink, avatars on social media, God.

All that is ostensibly facile and self-explanatory, for the babygirl, is gleaned through persistent observation. The babygirl fills emptiness with a divine estuary from which an embodied and pillow-soft love audaciously converges with nature’s brutal architecture—pulsating alive with blood and flesh.

Being a babygirl is like the infinitude of the world contained in a pop song or the gaze of someone staring down the barrel of a gun; it stretches on and on forever. Anyone, then, who sees through people like they are vacant homes waiting to be occupied by her, who thinks they know others with the cultic conviction of a true believer, who is wildly and wholeheartedly alert, is a babygirl.

And I am Princess Babygirl.

I am novelty combined with appropriation like collage art, music sampling and recipes. My palimpsest quality is not an encryption of the self; but rather, an illuminating synthesis of my embodied experience. I have been the host to various narratives, epistemes, connections and dreams that I’ve neither fully abandoned nor refined. I’ve imprinted my affects and vibes forever–going on and on like the perfect pop song on repeat–so I can never be erased. Princess Babygirl is who I was before all of the sublimated tensions, marketplace competitions, traumas, vulnerabilities, anxieties, mimetic rivalries, delusions, dreams and violence of womanhood happened to me.

As Carl Jung foretold in his writings on the Age of Aquarius, human consciousness is moving toward a more feminine-centric paradigm. I want to represent the metamodern conditions of this moment in a blend of identity-critical autotheory and audiovisual stimuli exploring affects, aesthetics, taste, psychology, consumerism, the performance of womanhood and modern femininity.

[sandramiksaauthor]

What is Autofiction (+ 5 Autofiction Novels 📖)

[suedeness]