This is a blog I wrote for the Vintage Books website - which is will well worth checking out. But I will be posting the Vintage blogs here as well. Tomorrow's blog is about favourite books and influences.

There are certain mildly pejorative phrases that are strongly associated with first novels, including, ‘thinly veiled autobiography’ and ‘coming-of-age’. I don’t really believe in a ‘coming-of-age’. I haven’t become any smarter; at best, I’ve become street-smarter. Being street-smart is important in the practical business of getting on, earning a living and not pissing people off, but has nothing to do with the transformative epiphanic experiences that we associate with ‘coming-of-age’. My life is like an anti-coming-of-age-novel. I’m in my thirties and as ignorant as ever. To some extent ‘The dubious salvation of Jack V’ is also an anti-coming-of-age novel. Jack is selfish, he screws up and shit happens, but I don’t believe that it will have a profound effect on what he does in the future. In this sense Jack is a lot like me.

However it would make me uncomfortable if anyone did think the book was strictly autobiographical, mainly because Jack does such a shitty thing. I hope it’s something the reader can’t quite forgive him for. Of course I have borrowed a great deal from my own childhood. I don’t think there is a better source of material than one’s own experiences - recycled, fictionalised, heightened and finally held together by the sort of strong narrative arc that one never finds in everyday life. If ever I had something that was close to an epiphanic experience it was when I realised that I could use something that had happened to me and then exaggerate and embroider and lie, like you do at a dinner party after a few glasses of wine, but without your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse ruining a great story with the truth. The truth isn’t snappy and the truth is rarely as much fun.

But the question of autobiography is far more complicated than dinner party anecdotes, which over the years bear little resemblance to the original events that were their genesis. To speak with confidence about autobiography, as if the genre were easily defined, is to speak as if the epistemological debates in the university had long been settled. What is truth? What is knowledge? That thing we trust above all else today, the guarantor of truth, is the video camera, which records, we believe, what actually happened. But even the video camera performs a necessary interpretive violence through framing. There is never a context wholly sufficient to make truth, that difficult world, fully present.

What then of our own memories? Some years ago my sister told me about a chance encounter with an Israeli soldier at a Starbucks café in Auckland. Three years later I said to her, ‘Remember that time we met that Israeli soldier?’
‘We?’ she said. ‘It was just me. You weren’t there.’
‘I was,’ I protested. ‘I remember!’ But I wasn’t. I had fabricated a memory. My sister, I should add, has a vivid way of telling stories and so this clear picture had become lodged in my brain and misfiled as a memory in which I was present. This is why I would be extremely cautious about ever writing anything called an ‘autobiography’ and why we would do well to give Roth a break when we insist on knowing who the hell this Zuckerman chap really is. That demand is based on the assumption that the author could even tell us who this Roth chap really is. The question ‘What is autobiography’ is as complicated and unanswerable as the question, ‘What is literature?’ It is sufficiently difficult that one should proceed with caution when reading something the author calls ‘autobiography’, let alone something the author calls ‘a novel’.

Having said all that, it’s no bad thing if a book reads like autobiography; in fact I can think of no higher compliment for a book written in the first person. It means you have made the world and the characters so real, so credible that the reader can only conclude that it must be based on true events. In that sense, everything one writes should feel like ‘thinly veiled autobiography’ even if every last detail, is completely fictional.