Speaker 3
That's right, right. First person plural. There you go. That this has become a form that really is starting to brush back many other ways of knowing and learning and being narrated to. Are we living through maybe a glut too much for a person? Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and, you know,
Speaker 1
I'm guilty of it as well. I'm not I'm not even saying it is like, oh, those narcissists like clearly, you know, I sometimes I look at my ex feed and I'm like, oh, my God, there's so much I hear. Like there's so much. Why am I talking about myself so much? Why am I like sharing my unsolicited opinions every second? It's like, it's, it's too much. And I keep getting fed these reels on Instagram, which seem like so crazy to me. And yet I can't stop watching them. Like a day in a life of a single woman in her 40s in suburban Chicago. And it's like, I get up in the morning, you know, I walk around the reservoir. I like make myself tea with two, you know, teaspoons of honey. Then I, you know, do my skincare routine. I'm like, is this person why am i watching this why am i riveted by
Speaker 3
her riveted i'm
Speaker 1
riveted by her first person narration of her completely mundane experiences this is just one example it could be like a guy in his like 20s and whatever in the countryside who raises pigs, you know. So it does seem like it's like almost unending our desire, people's desire to tell their first person stories. And then viewers desire to watch them and listen to them.
Speaker 3
Yeah, I totally feel this. Any one of these things, I will go with, by the way. It's just like,
Speaker 1
yeah, I don't know even why exactly. Like why you're riveted. I'm riveted. Yeah. I mean, it's very sticky for some reason. It's very sticky.
Speaker 2
Part of me wants to say that it's because the technology just will continuously serve this up. Yes. And
Speaker 1
it's easier than going and writing or going and doing dishes. No, but it's
Speaker 2
a real question. The first person, then you just sort of slump into this passive state where these accounts are flashing before your eyes. Yeah, no, we're in a complete glut. I mean, we love to talk about social media on this show. Well, like, that's – it's because it's a huge thing. I mean, I'm thinking back, you know, you're describing something that's kind of coincident with the rise of social media. And I think it's coming around again. And I want to hear what you guys think about this. In the, let's say, early 2010s, there was an absolute boom of personal essays online. It was golden age with an asterisk of the... XO Jane. Yes. The website XO Jane was... It happened to me. Exactly. Nomi, want to explain what it happened to me was? Yeah.
Speaker 1
Well, it happened to me. So XO Jane was a site founded by Jane Pratt, who previously before that was the editor-in of Sassy Magazine, which was extremely important to me as a teenager in the 90s. It was the kind of like cooler teen magazine. And It Happened to Me was, in fact, column in Sassy magazine where readers, you know, teenage readers would write in with their stories. You know, it happened to me. I got stood up for prom. It happened to me. You know, my sister died from a drug overdose, whatever. And, you know, for as as a reader of these stories, they were important to me because I do think it was kind of like an empathy creating mechanism. And it's a kind of especially as a as a young girl, you're like, am I normal? Are these things that other girls are feeling? You know, all of that sort of thing. But then in XO Jane, which was later the site that, you know, as I said, Jane Pratt from Sassy founded in the 2010s, It happened to me, kind of used the same structure, but it became, because of the requirements of online, it became much more over the top than before. So I remember there was one that people talked about a lot, which was a girl who had left her tampon in. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. It was like things that were – it went into kind of like extreme – the extreme nether regions. Talking about body, right? Of kind
Speaker 2
of personhood, right? Like what won't we hear next? Totally. And I think one thing that marked this period was, you know, the technology of publishing was changing. So many things were moving online. So there needed to be a lot more content. And then there was a lot less money in media at the same time. Advertising crashed. And there was this kind of idea, I think, especially for young women, that if you want to make your name, if you want to get a shot at writing professionally and publicly, here's a really good way to do it. And, you know, there have been all kinds of debates about whether this was good or bad, but I think it's not that unlike, you know, saying if you want to be in the movies, you got to show a little skin. Like, yeah, come on in, strip down. Like, the incentives were kind of skewed. And so this led to a lot of stuff out there and a lot of pressure on people to put stuff out there. And an audience reaction, you know, now I'm thinking of like the cut at New York Magazine is kind of what I think of as almost in a throwback way has gone to publishing these essays where you wonder, are you guys doing this to get rage clicks? I married an
Speaker 2
I married an older man. I hate my cat. Oh, yeah. Which, yeah, an essay that kind of published last
Speaker 1
year. It was a woman who had a new baby and wanted her cat dead because she didn't have time for the cat, essentially. And neglected the cat. Neglected
Speaker 2
the cat. The cat seems to be fine. We have no involvement with that. I don't want to get us involved in that whole brouhaha. Please. But what I'm interested in asking you guys, what I'm kind of wondering,
Speaker 2
I think it's like a bit chic to hate on the name autofiction and just sort of say, oh, fiction, people have written autobiographical fiction forever. Autofiction is like, you know, some common ideas about it, I guess, are that the protagonist of this work is an avatar for the narrator, that they usually have the narrator's name, if not the name, a very close similarity to the narrator. And the narrator is kind of sending them about business that could closely resemble the writers, but may differ in important ways. We're not supposed to say, oh, yeah, all this stuff happened. But the idea is to play with that similarity. And just to give people a sense of what I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of books like the seven-volume My Struggle by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Nelsgaard. I'm thinking of Ben Lerner's book, especially the book 1004. I'm thinking of Sheila Hedy's book How Should a Person Be? To me, autofiction is the literary response to the culture of self-exposure on the internet. All of this has to do so much with our era where we all have avatars out in the world anyway. So what do we do when we put them on the page and make them literary? What do we actually want to create in the distance between the real self and someone else? And I think this kind of like brings us back in some ways to the big question we're asking, which is, can you be in someone else's shoes? I think with autofiction, the question is like, can I even be in my own sometimes?
