Paul Stümpel

One reason Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has been so popular, and that other works of autotheory including Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable books, divulging very personal details in ways that are neither confessional nor egoistic, but are instead an offering to readers: here is mine.

At its worst, heavily researched nonfiction risks becoming not only anti-feminist, but also inherently western and White, in privileging disembodied intellect—the clinical voice, the pretext of objectivity, as well as outside authority—over one’s own lived experience, body, and imagination (though as Toni Morrison has pointed out, imagination itsel

“There has long been an assumed dichotomy between research-driven and personal writing, with the former [construed as] rigorous and intellectual and male, and the latter frivolous and easy and female.”

Sarah Menkedick

The works of creative nonfiction I find most intriguing are less interested in what is “real”—the kind of narrative that expresses confident authority in the nature of a singular reality—than in what is “true,” and true is usually fragmentary, overlapping, retreating, dissenting. It rarely fits into boxes.

AUTOTHEORY AS REBELLION: ON RESEARCH, EMBOD