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Seven months ago, I was in the middle of taking the trash out when my husband told me his parents wouldn’t like my novel. With one foot braced against our tomato-splattered trash can, and my fingers deep inside the tangled plastic bag, I stopped and stared at him.
“Why wouldn’t they like it?” I asked.
“Well, they might actually like it,” he conceded. “But they’ll definitely think you cheated on me.”
I let go of the bag, and tomato juice splattered all over the floor.
It had never crossed my mind that I’d written something that might prompt other people to question my marriage. I wrote my debut novel, Clickbait, during COVID lockdowns, while my husband was stuck in the U.K. for eight months awaiting a working visa, and I was stuck in New York, reporting for a newspaper. We were in the midst of re-planning our wedding for whenever the global plague (hopefully) dissipated.
While I sat in front of my laptop, day after day that summer, I started reading stories about people who had imploded their lives. People were quitting their jobs in spectacular fashion, moving to the middle of the country and launching homesteads, prepper-style, without any discernible agricultural skills. People were joining anti-vaxxer conspiracy sites and marching for QAnon. One woman had a prestigious journalism job, a happy marriage and a beautiful home, then fell in love with her interviewee, a man who’d just committed a serious white-collar crime and was going to prison for it. I thought to myself, in those long days with only my rescue cat for company: What might the worst version of my life look like? And then I wrote it.
My protagonist, Natasha, is that pitiful creature who so often makes publishers balk: an “unlikeable female protagonist.” She’s not on a journey to have it all; she had it all. She grew up privileged, waltzed into a great job, met a nice husband, and married relatively young. She was the person who made followers curdle with jealousy as they scrolled through social media, cyber-stalking people they sat next to in high school. Then she blows it all up, cheats on her husband in a flagrant violation of both personal and professional ethics, implodes her career and her marriage (in public), and goes on to creepily obsess over another man who doesn’t want anything to do with her.
When my mother asked to read the manuscript, I demurred.
“It has blow jobs in it,” I told my sister, via text.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” my sister blithely replied. “It’s not like Mom doesn’t know about sex.”
But, I mean… it has a lot of blow jobs in it.
When I started receiving advance copies of the book, telling friends about it and counting down to launch day, I realized—about a year and a half too late—that people I knew would actually read it. Hell, people I didn’t know would read it. They were going to have strong feelings about my car-crash protagonist; my “Woman Going Through It” narrative; the inappropriate situations that my characters found themselves in. Because she’s a female protagonist, they might criticize Natasha for not being “relatable” enough. And because I’m a female author, they might assume everything I’d written was based, in part, on my own life—and that my extremely new marriage was already on the rocks. It wouldn’t only be my in-laws who might doubt my marital fidelity; the whole world could harbor the same suspicions.
Delving into one’s personal life for authorial inspiration is hardly a rare phenomenon; indeed, writing “what you know” is the first lesson taught in all too many creative writing courses. And autofiction—that is, the specific genre that blends creative narrative with autobiographical elements from the author’s life—has become something of a buzzword in the past decade, not coincidentally in the same breath as journalism’s hooked itself on confessional essays. In both cases, the burden’s been largely placed on women to generate such content. What might have begun with genuine, good-natured intent—allowing traditionally marginalized writers space to explore their own experiences after hundreds of years of men taking center-stage—has been pretzel-twisted into a general expectation that when women write, it’s almost always about their lived experiences.
That’s not to say that some writers don’t do this with breathtaking talent and edge. Nora Ephron mined her own marital problems in Heartburn, famously torching a lot of her real-life relationships as she did so. Monica Heisey wrote her phenomenally successful debut novel, Really Good, Actually, about the experience of going through a divorce in her 20s. Candice Carty-Williams’ incredible Queenie is, in the words of the author, not directly autobiographical, but constructed from “themes that I’ve borrowed from my life and my friends’ lives.”
The fact that all these female authors have talked about elements of autobiography in their work, however, isn’t necessarily because women writers like to delve into their personal lives more than men do. It’s because they’re always asked about it. When a woman writes a book that strikes a chord with huge swathes of the population, many readers want to believe she did it by trickery or by happenstance; she simply experienced the right things at the right time, and she happened to write it all down. Even experimental, deeply strange fiction like Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment has been criticized for being autobiographical in nature, despite the fact that very little is known about the pseudonymous Italian author. How could she possibly write so compellingly about the collapse of her inner world while trying to mother two children, people wonder, if she didn’t get it all from real life? What’s the trick she played to make it all happen?
I noticed a similar trend during my work in journalism. I’ve spent my reporting career in a very male-dominated corner of the newsroom: the politics desk. I started off covering general news in the London office of The Independent before moving into political satire writing and, a few years later, in 2019, I was transferred to New York to cover American elections. I often write articles about national conventions, or CPAC, or big political interviews conducted with Democratic and Republican candidates for office. I did the same with both parties (Labour and Conservative) in the U.K. It will surprise exactly no one to hear that the comments made below the line on those articles, or tweeted at me in response to my reports, were mostly non-complimentary. I didn’t get into the game for the likes. But what I did notice, again and again, was that the particular nature of those negative comments was very different when I wrote something, as opposed to when a male colleague did. If readers hated what a male journalist wrote, they would get angry. But when I wrote something readers disagreed with, the response was predictable: Readers told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. I hadn’t the experience to firmly grasp my subject matter. Without that experience, I could never understand or communicate properly. I could never be taken seriously. While my male colleagues were called “assholes,” I was told that I had “misunderstood.”
This belief that a woman’s insights are limited to the precise contours of her lived experience is toxic. It’s also profoundly boring. I constructed Natasha—an infuriating, pervy, car crash of a character—out of the worst impulses in the ickiest part of my psyche, undoubtedly. But she is not me, and isn’t that the point? In her self-destructive spiral, she does the stuff no one else would do. She does the stuff I would never do. She says the thoughts that might fleetingly run through someone’s mind before they dismiss them in horror. And she was fun to write because of that! The humor of the book is predicated on the fact that there’s a gap between what a “normal,” average person would do or think, and what Natasha does or thinks. Similarly, the awful newspaper for which Natasha works does not resemble the newspaper for which I work—otherwise we’d be in even deeper trouble as a society than we already are.
None of this means I dislike fiction “inspired by real events.” (Nor does it mean I should escape criticism were I to write about something I truly don’t understand.) Indeed, some of the best works of creative mastery belong to the autofiction genre. But it’s telling that when we hear the term, we’re much more likely to think of Rachel Cusk, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Alexandra Tanner than we are of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, or James Joyce’s Dubliners, or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, or George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London—all of which are so clearly autobiographical.
The history of literature is replete with men telling their personal stories, either obviously or in a thinly veiled manner. But the assumption that male writing isn’t necessarily autofictional gives male authors the space to work with unlikable protagonists and to explore uncomfortable issues. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is hardly an uncontroversial book—but it wouldn’t persist as a classic if everyone believed the novel was secretly a pedophilic confession. Neither Holden Caulfield nor Patrick Bateman have been assumed to stand in for their author’s own personal quirks, either.
My novel, Clickbait, is out this month. My mother and my sister are both traveling over from the U.K. to attend the launch. They’ve both read it. (My mother said she preferred Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, if anyone’s looking for recommendations.)
But have I, despite all this pontificating, gotten up the courage to send a copy to my in-laws?
Of course not. A recent conversation with a friend about “who each character is based on” made me realize that, much as I feel strongly about pushing back against society’s autofiction assumptions, I don’t have the energy to do so during every family dinner for the rest of my life. I’ve also realized that the more I distanced myself from Natasha during that argument (“She’s disgusting! She’s messed up! I would never make those terrible, horrible choices!”), the more I felt compelled to defend her (“Well, look, she has poor impulse control, but who doesn’t? And anyway, couldn’t her husband have been romantic once in a while?”) The simple fact is that, as her creator, I do understand what makes her tick, even if I don’t in any way share her worldview. Explaining that discrepancy might make for a fascinating podcast or literary event, but it won’t make Thanksgiving turkey go down any easier.
My husband is supportive, though. “I know that everything’s fair game in art, and I don’t mind being embarrassed by people’s assumptions,” he said on that long-ago evening. He took the trash out for the rest of the month.
Holly Baxter is an executive editor and reporter at The Independent in New York City. She has experience generating clicks on both sides of the Atlantic, having worked in London for seven years previously. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and baby son.