Joanna Biggs on her book A Life of One’s Own, autofiction, and the modern review
Hugo Teubal
This past November, I carried out an interview with Joanna Biggs, contributing editor to the Yale Review. Biggs, born in London and based in New York, formerly an editor at TheLondon Review of Books as well as at Harper’sMagazine, and author of two books (All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, and A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again) is a master of autofiction – narratives that centre around the self.
Indeed in her latest work, A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, Biggs collects the biographies of eight women writers (Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante) and intertwines them with her own personal narrative. I, as someone interested in autofiction — from an entertainment point of view (see me devouring books by Joan Didion, Dolly Alderton, Patti Smith), but also from an academic one (see my thesis dissertation, about Joan Didion’s gaze on late twentieth-century America) — felt, after reading A Life of One’s Own, the need to ask her more.
What have you been reading recently?
I just read Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, whom I wrote about in my book. I really, really enjoyed it, and it reminded me of how high the standard actually is for novel writing, that there is this deeply intellectual tradition.
Do you feel the weight of that tradition?
I do, yeah, I do. And it can be really crushing. Sometimes I think, there's no way I could produce something like this. I'm a British woman writer, so in some way I’m working in that line, but I’m not Eliot. But I am trying.
Although sometimes you read Eliot and Austen, and you are like, “wow, this is an incredible book.” And then you go and read their letters and journals, and you see how much they struggled, and how much they didn't like the books I find to be incredible. I really relate to that. I find it encouraging. I guess I feel overshadowed at some points and then encouraged at others, and I think maybe you need that back and forth to write.
Is that why you included them in A Life of One’s Own?
Yeah, because I needed a bar to reach, or a closeness to them: both things to help me feel that I could be a writer.
Talking about your book, in which you placed yourself so clearly on the page, how has your life changed since its release?
That book came out at a very weird time in my life – just a year into living in New York, six months after my mother had died. It felt like the major crisis had passed. I haven't reread the last chapter of that book recently, but I remember feeling when I wrote it that I had to package my life up and give a conclusion to the reader, and I knew I couldn't do that because I didn't feel fully finished as a person. I didn't feel like I had a particularly good moral to offer. I just knew that I wanted to say, “the struggle is worth it.”
I've lost a bit of confidence in my writing, especially in the last year. That’s new. Maybe a year after the book was released, I felt that I had stopped questioning myself so much about whether I was a real writer or not. I had said to myself, “actually, this is none of my business, I need to do my writing and just let everyone else deal with that. It's not my problem.” But recently I’ve felt that my writing isn't up to the standard that it should be, especially compared to some that belong to that tradition, like Eliot or, for instance, Annie Ernaux.
There are now people who like my writing and want to read more of it, and I also don't want to disappoint them, so there's a sense of…
Expectation, maybe.
Yeah. And I’m not as confident as I was. I don't exactly know why that is the case, but maybe in time, I will find out. Or I will feel better.
You mention Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for her autofiction. We're living in a moment where the popularity of these kinds of narratives is at an all-time high. Do you feel that your book is part of this conversation?
Um.. [really big pause]. I suppose, if I'm being truthful, I didn't really think about it at the time, and I don't really think about it generally as I write. But I do think my book has something to offer those other books.
If autofiction is about thinking about how we imagine our lives and where we place them next to fiction, how we narrativise ourselves in the world, not just taking our experience and transforming that into fiction, or its opposite, saying we just imagined them out of thin air, then what happens if you're a bit more honest about that narrativization as a critic? If you essentially say something like: “I'm a critic and I'm going through a divorce and this is what I've seen in Sylvia Plath’s poetry that I’ve never seen before”?
I suppose that is a valuable thing to say. That it isn't just novelists, but critics and biographers and other essayists who are reflecting on how their own lives condition what they are able to argue as critics. And that if we met each other honestly in that space, in the critical space, there'd be quite a lot of interesting things that could happen there.
Spanish author Rosa Montero said that autofiction is “a symptom of fatigue, of a lesser capacity to make great fiction”. You said in an interview: “Obviously, you create a character to get some distance and I was not interested in that distance”. Do you think Montero’s right? That no one seems to want to put the effort into creating this distance?
Yeah, I love that idea. [pause] I love that idea. I'm often interested in fatigue and how it comes into writing. She might mean not just a “I’m tired, I don't want to do the extra work”, a sort of response to the imperatives of the industry of “write more, write more”, but maybe also more of an existential tiredness, “oh, I've got to gin up a whole character”. And that “fakeness” is wearing on a writer not being able to be themselves in some way. And I do relate to that, actually, because there's something deeply tiring about pretending to be someone else. And not just someone else, but an objective critic who knows everything, and has read everything, and doesn't have doubts about her work and doesn't change her mind; who is not allowed to be human in her work.
One of the differences between my last book and this book is that I do feel like I'm in my second book. For better or worse, I'm in there, and I'm in there thinking and doubting and changing my mind and doing stupid things and trying other things. It takes a lot of effort to pretend that you're not human. It is much easier in some ways to be like, “this is me”. There are things that are messy in A Life of One’s Own and things that I'm not proud of, but it is somehow a bit easier from this point.
We talked about how autofiction are the ‘it thing’ now in the literary world. But in other forms other than literature, like short articles, interviews, reviews – they haven't been welcomed in the same way. What do you think is their future?
I'm terrible at answering questions about knowing what the future is.
Um. I should change half of my interview then.
[laughs]. No, no, no, I can try. I can try.
When I'm assigning reviews, what I particularly want to see is one mind meeting another across time and space. I particularly want to know – want to see captured on the page – the relationship the reviewer had to the book, not just what worked and didn’t work.
But there is a different relationship to the written word now. Some understand that popular culture is part of the world and move towards it, some go the other way and become sort of inviolable; deeply, deeply literary. I’m thinking of a critic who's read every single biography of the person they’re writing about, read their full work, has read other writers around them, and has a sense of fitting the book under review into all that, producing the kind of review you could not see on Instagram or TikTok.
And for myself, I sort of want both. I want that sense of depth and detail. I want a flexible approach. You can look at it against the whole sweep of literary history, you can jump in and out of popular culture, you can write biographically if you need to. There's a sense of meeting the book where it is and trying to reanimate whatever you particularly like about it for the current audience. I actually prefer that to reviews that are very strongly argued – because that's another thing that's happening in the culture, I think you're getting very, very strong takes.
Do you think this is where the review is going?
Yeah, I do. More argumentative. I think there are still places where a sense of curiosity and exploration is available, particularly in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, but there are other places too, where you find critics sitting with a book and explaining it and thinking about it, and almost very lightly coming to make certain points about it. I like Sheila Heti's work very much, and I find that, often, if I really like something, it doesn't always immediately make sense to me. Sitting with it, working out where it fits, why I like it, is really cool.
In terms of the modern review, a lot of people are talking about social media, you know, Instagram, as a form of short review. There's also Letterboxd, Substack–
Totally.
But in the end, it doesn't feel the same for me. It feels more like PR. Like a social media manager’s kind of work rather than a writer's craft.
Though actually all quite different cases, aren't they? I think Letterboxd is really nice because it has a sense of amateur, that sense of just loving something so much – nerding out on movies and posting about them. I kind of love that, that real love for a form, for a thing that is rare or weird or something. I think that will continue.
Substack is interesting because I think it's almost heading towards some of the other stuff we’ve been talking about, about a particular writer meeting another particular writer across time and space in the review. There are people's voices, their real, true voices, unedited and at length. I subscribe to a lot of Substacks, and it can be a really enlivening form. It feels very personal, as if you are emailing directly with someone.
They are personal.
Yeah, I guess it's what we’ve been talking about: autofiction and personal elements, they’re compelling. It's almost a form of friendship. So I think all of those cases are quite different, but they're definitely filtering up into newspapers and magazines in interesting ways.
I’m writing a review of Taylor Swift’s new album, and I keep coming back and finding in the discourse around her a general disdain towards female autofiction. We have talked about your book being part of this conversation. Do you think that after publishing A Life of One’s Own, you share this burden as well?
Aahh!! I really love her too; I’m a Swiftie. And I do feel it sometimes. One of the things that people say about Taylor is that because she's rich and famous in a way that none of us can ever understand, having any sympathy with her is ridiculous, and I see what they mean. But I personally do, sometimes, feel a little bit of kinship with someone who is being vulnerable and open, or who is being discussed and misunderstood. I think all of us have had some experience of that in our lives, just among our friends or in our communities, of your life being discussed in certain ways.
About the critiques of autofiction – I really think that's some version of sexism, the idea that women don't make art, they just tell you what's going on in their lives. Another artist I'm really interested in is Tracey Emin, and the way that her work has been misunderstood. She’s often thought to be telling us what happened as opposed to transforming her life experience into art that can be used in various ways over time.
I think that’s always been the case. I studied for a Master's in eighteenth-century literature in London, and a lot of the very early women novelists went to great pains to show that they were respectable women. The reason they did that was because they knew their work was going to be read autobiographically.
I feel this too sometimes, that people just want to know what happened next in my life. That after I made my life available as a narrative that anyone can access for $20, they might feel they have a right to know what's happened to me, what I'm doing now, what I'm feeling, if I’m depressed again, whatever.
I struggle with that, because part of me has done that [shared my life with my readers] and wants to do it, and is interested in doing it; knows that it’s valuable because it connects me to many people — people who are living through difficult things. At the same time a part of me is like, I deserve a chance to live my life, to be seen as a writer to without giving over everything.
Sometimes I feel that my only value is that I will tell you what people won’t [laughs]. And I think that that plays on women artists' minds. Are they being taken seriously as artists, or are their lives and bodies just being sold and packaged in ways that they don't have control over?