| Lucia Berlin in Albuquerque, 1963 Photo by Buddy Berlin |
The Short Autofictions of Eve Babitz, Lucia Berlin and Bette Howland
NINA ELLIS
23 August 2022
ABSTRACT
What happens when autofiction meets the short form? Coined in France in the late 1970s, the term ‘autofiction’ refers to writing that blurs the boundary between fiction and fact. It is currently enjoying a vogue in the Anglophone publishing world, where it is used almost exclusively to refer to novel-length works. However, shorter autofictions have existed in English for decades. This study considers the short stories of the late-twentieth-century American writers Bette Howland, Lucia Berlin and Eve Babitz – who have recently been labeled ‘autofiction writers’ – and asks what happens to the genre when it is adapted to the short form. Howland’s Blue in Chicago (1978) demonstrates that brevity brings out the constructed aspects of autofiction. Throughout Berlin’s writing, the contrasts between short autofictions about similar but not identical events equally accentuate the fictional qualities of her work. And in Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), Babitz disrupts the short story collection, as a form, by interspersing her stories with love notes to a reader who isn’t quite fictional, but isn’t quite real. This paper concludes that shortness requires readers to engage with the ‘fiction’ half of the genre, which is too often overlooked in discussions of longer autofictional texts.