Literary Friction Special - Elif Batuman
Literary Friction
Is the Novel Really About Your Life?
There was a very strong idea when i was and that in the nineties, which is when i was first taking creative writing classes, that great literature. That if you write about your own life, your being either a mere stenographer and not an artist, or your naval gazing and you'r being self indulgent. And i actually increasingly find this pernicious ideology. Not that there's anything wrong with inventing things, but i think that that insistence that it's not art if it's actually about your life actually served to bolster this elitist model of who got to write and who got to tell stories.
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