It has now been more than ten years since Rachel Cusk told an interviewer at the Guardian, “I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” The book Cusk was promoting at the time, her 2014 novel Outline, wasn’t quite autobiography, though neither was it wholly fiction: it was an attempt to reconcile her sense that pure fiction was “fake and embarrassing” with the harsh response to her recent memoirs, which had been so bitter and personal (one subject of 2009’s The Last Supper had sued her). “My mode of autobiography had come to an end,” Cusk explained. “I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry.”
Though neither Cusk nor her interviewer mentioned the word “autofiction,” these quotes quickly became an ambivalent sort of rallying cry for this ascendant literary tendency. Cusk’s words echoed through literary media—the “only form in all the arts” line was repeated in the New Yorker, the New Republic and the Los Angeles Review of Books, to name a few—and therefore among fiction writers, including those in my MFA program, which I entered in August of 2016. Cusk was describing something that seemed to be happening across a small but influential stack of contemporary novels and a much larger corpus of essays about those novels: a moral audit of realist fiction, and of free indirect narration in particular.
Whether the idea disturbed you or not, you had to admit that in the most literal, materialist sense, the polyphonic realisms of the Dickensian social novel and its cousin the Great American Novel were ventriloquism masquerading as true human variety, with one writer hurling his voice in various directions, fabricating a crowd from his isolation. With that in mind, what was to be done? Among my MFA peers, this was a topic of much impassioned debate, both in workshop and at the bar to which we repaired each Thursday after the weekly reading series: Was it the case, both aesthetically and ethically, that a writer had some moral obligation to stick as closely as possible to what he knew? It was a contagious question. In my MFA application’s statement of purpose, I’d proudly listed my influences as Mary Gaitskill, James Salter and Paula Fox; by my second semester I’d submitted to workshop a constipated, largely unparagraphed “remembrance” of college. (“I see you’ve been bitten by the autofiction bug,” one classmate wrote glumly on my manuscript after I switched sides.)
This mode of authorship was tempting, I think, because it offered a budding writer like myself a framework within which writing had clear moral stakes, even if those stakes were defined largely in the negative, as a practice of avoiding harm. And this harm had a name, at least in the private breviary of my brain: the narrative crime that W. G. Sebald calls “wrongful trespass,” the offense of projecting oneself into the unknowable emotional experience of another.
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Early in Sebald’s novel The Emigrants, the writer-narrator learns that his former primary school teacher, Paul Bereyter, has died by suicide. In his grief and shock, the narrator tries “to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like,” though the narrator is most interested in the moments immediately before his teacher’s death. Yet he acknowledges that “such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul” and indeed felt “presumptuous” and shameful. “It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.”1 Sebald’s statement of humility is also an ethic: “I have written down what I know” can be read as “I have written down only what I know.”
You can trace Sebald’s influence across the generic corpus of contemporary autofiction: this cautious self-reflexivity, the self-doubt so profound that the narrator is often reduced to silence. A defining generic trope of the autofictional novel is the Sebaldian moment when the sheer rottenness of trespassing upon the minds of friends and strangers leaves the writer-narrator so disgusted that conventional novelistic form must be renounced. Whether born of an ethical impulse or not, this renunciation is what distinguishes autofiction from autobiographical fiction or metafiction, as Christian Lorentzen has argued: to the degree that “autofiction” is a helpful term, it’s in naming the genre’s special emphasis on “the narrator’s … status as a writer or artist,” such that “the book’s creation is inscribed in the book itself,” forsaking “literary realism” in favor of the real.
Many autofictional authors of the 2010s regularly borrowed Sebald’s favorite strategies for destabilizing the writer-narrator’s authority: checking their accounts against hard externals and performing doubt about the error or insufficiency of their own interpretations. There are the grayscale photos of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011); the pivotally unreliable memory of Teju Cole’s narrator in Open City (2011); Garth Greenwell’s unparagraphed, objective-correlative exploration of an abandoned quarry, in the middle section of What Belongs to You (2016), as a means of excavating the compacted strata of one’s own trauma and one’s own culpability in the pain of others; and the garrulous interlocutors of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014-2018), whose extended monologues make the writer-protagonist less a narrator than a tacit recipient of others’ narrations.
These novels do contain beauty and pleasure, but to me they feel overcast with loneliness, as well as a self-recriminating anger, which suggests that the righteous abandonment of allofiction for autofiction doesn’t solve one’s writerly problems. The world remains fractured, the dead stay dead, and beneath it all, you’re alone. To write while observing such an ethical program is a demanding vocation; Sebald told his graduate creative writing students as much, reportedly, at their first meeting in the fall semester of 2001, his last before his death in December of that year. “Being always on your own,” Sebald said, “with your own thoughts, trying to make sense of them, being forced to constantly invent things—is this not a recipe for mental ruin?”
Despite Sebald’s warnings, many younger novelists have followed his path, though few have pursued his ethical program with the idiosyncratic rigor of Luke Williams, a former student of Sebald’s who recorded the above recollection in a 2011 essay, and his classmate Natasha Soobramanien. Their collaborative novel Diego Garcia, published in 2022 by Fitzcarraldo and Semiotext(e), imagines an alternative aesthetic solution to the problem of “wrongful trespass.” If a writer is necessarily constrained by the limits of his own subjectivity, they expand that subjectivity at the source: they write with two heads instead of one.
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We know Diego Garcia is fiction because the title page says “a novel”; and we know it’s not quite, because the authors’ note on the next page begins, “At the heart of this novel are two real events.”
The first of those events involves the decolonization of Mauritius. When Mauritius gained independence from Britain in 1968, Britain insisted upon retaining control of a group of Mauritian islands known as the Chagos Archipelago, and then leased the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States. This, we now know, had been the plan all along: the U.S. had struck a deal for “exclusive control” of Diego Garcia in order to build a strategically important military base there. This deal stipulated that the island be furnished “without local inhabitants,” and so between 1968 and 1973, the British government forcibly deported around 2,000 Chagossians from Diego Garcia, with support from the U.S. At first, British officials simply refused to let islanders return if they left for vacation or medical treatment, and then they restricted shipments of food and medicine, hoping that the islanders would leave autonomously if not quite voluntarily. Finally, in 1971, the British began deliberately terrorizing the islanders by killing their dogs in improvised gas chambers. British officers forced the remaining islanders onto crowded cargo ships, sent them to Mauritius or the Seychelles—in some cases separating families—and abandoned them to their fate.2
You have to read a while before it becomes clear that Natasha Soobramanien’s fictive avatar is of partial Mauritian descent, like her author. Still later, we learn that the second “real event” alluded to in the authors’ note is the suicide of Luke Williams’s brother, whose fictive counterpart the authors call Daniel.
The setting is Edinburgh, 2014. Two friends named Damaris and Oliver Pablo, each with one published novel, both deeply in debt, are spending the summer alone together. They wander the city. They get drunk. They argue for no particular reason and spend a few hours apart, which are rendered in two parallel columns of text. They reconcile, they hug: “Her/his shoulder/neck felt warm against his/her neck/shoulder.” They never quite make it to the library, where they’ve been trying to write… what, exactly? A malaise, which they call simply the sadness, has leached them both of purpose.
They meet a homeless, undocumented man who calls himself Diego, who explains that he’s descended from the Chagossians of Diego Garcia; Damaris records his narrative on her phone. After a night of carousing with the narrators, Diego disappears, leaving behind his many suitcases, which the narrators try unsuccessfully to return to him.
As a substitute, and for lack of anything better to do, they begin researching Diego Garcia. Their narrative becomes interleaved with shot descriptions from the 2011 documentary Chagos ou la mémoire des îles, which follows a group of Chagossians on a supervised visit back to the archipelago. These film clips—which, to be clear, are real—deliver the most wrenching parts of the Chagossians’ story, without commentary or embellishment. One displaced islander explains that when the British killed the islanders’ dogs, they made them herd their own companions to be gassed. Had the British officers tried it themselves, the dogs would have bitten them.
It’s as if they killed a human being… They could have done the same to us. It would have been better. They should have killed us. Then it would have been over. Instead, they’re killing us with grief. Not with bullets. But with disease, with heartbreak. They’re killing us in another way.
The Chagossian dialect has its own term for that heartbreak, which the novel uses repeatedly: sagren, “an emotional-existential shock” that refers specifically to the deaths of despair that occurred during or because of the deportations.
“Sagren” is left untranslated but unitalicized: it is not flagged as a foreign word floating amid recognizable English, but brought into the language as a word for a concept that hasn’t yet been named. Nor is sagren equated to the sadness, though it’s clearly derived from the French chagrin, meaning “sadness” or “sorrow.”
The question of whether these words are commensurable, if not quite equivalent, hangs over the whole novel. How can anyone write about profound losses, whether historical or personal, that are not their own? To this very Sebaldian question they add another: If no single voice can do justice to these traumas, is it possible that more than one could?
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To these ethical quandaries, Diego Garcia proposes some aesthetic solutions. The novel is written in an unusual narrative voice, a hybrid of its two writer-protagonists’. It is an idiolect closely resembling British English, dense with inside jokes and jargon (the words “book” and “cigarette” are only ever called “block” and “tube,” respectively, abstracting the objects to their essential geometric forms), and particularly reliant on unconventional pronouns that locate the narration somewhere between first-person plural and free indirect discourse:
It had taken us a while to get out of the flat, him offering to buy us a coffee from the Swedish café and one of those cardamom buns we liked so much if she would come to the library. We noticed how people passing noticed us.
But the unity eventually breaks down. After Diego disappears, Damaris decides to write about him. At first, she simply translates Diego’s story from Mauritian Kreol, but then she decides to fictionalize it—to “rewrite what Diego had said but as she imagined Diego’s sister Rose might have told it.” It’s up to us to decide whether Damaris’s story, “Garde,” is an expression of solidarity or wrongful trespass, because in addition to drawing from Diego’s testimony, Damaris is clearly writing about Daniel, Oliver Pablo’s late brother, projecting onto Diego’s life details from Daniel’s, from his job as a museum guard and his time squatting in abandoned buildings to his commitment to a mental hospital. In Damaris’s story, Diego checks himself out, just like Daniel did, and takes his own life.
Oliver Pablo takes umbrage at this characterization. He’s most offended, strangely, by the notion that Diego could have talked his way out of the mental hospital, as Daniel did: “they would not have let Diego out,” Oliver Pablo says, on account of his race and class. But it’s clear that Oliver Pablo’s anger is rooted more in grief than in Damaris’s insufficient grasp of white privilege: “You could have imagined a future for him. It’s just a story she says. Yes but not yours. Diego could be anywhere. He is alive, I know it.” Neither of them can manage to find the right words to describe what happened—to Diego and Daniel and, of course, to themselves, in the wake of these losses.
When the narrative picks up again, it’s 2020. Six years have passed, and the novel’s form has reinvented itself: we’re reading an email from Damaris to Oliver Pablo. She’s living in Brussels, where she’s still “trying and failing” to make something of Diego’s story.
“I guess I am wondering,” she writes, “why you and I felt—I still feel—so compelled to engage with this story as writers. How as a writer do you tell a story that needs to be shared, if it is not your story?”
She’s attached to her email a new story titled “NOTES FOR ‘GARDE’, OR HOW WE BECAME A WRITER.” This text may be Damaris’s take on the Sebaldian moment in which a writer-narrator swears off fiction in favor of fact, but it’s at least as much about Oliver Pablo’s history of presumptuous trespass as her own.
Oliver Pablo, Damaris recalls, had been drawn to writing for the commendable purpose of wanting to give a voice to the voiceless. To do so, he’d applied to a prestigious graduate creative writing program (similar to how Williams and Soobramanien met in the M.A. program at the University of East Anglia, where they studied with Sebald). But this is not the story of how we became writers, plural, a rousing tale of two frenemies whose collegial rivalry spurs both of them to new creative heights. No, it’s “how we became a writer,” singular, and told with the tough love for which we rely on our true friends.
The simple truth is that Oliver Pablo was overwhelmed by getting exactly what he wanted. After signing with “the most famous agency in the world” and taking a book deal with “the best publisher in London,” he was unable to finish his manuscript, and found himself two years past his deadline, his advance completely gone, in a state of desperation.
The solution was a practical one that only later attained the fullness of its biographical, aesthetic and ethical significance: Damaris offered to help Oliver Pablo finish the novel. She wrote two chapters for him, diary entries by the protagonist’s former lover, precisely as Soobramanien actually did for Williams’s 2011 debut The Echo Chamber. (In the actual novel, this character’s name was Damaris; Damaris’s diary, the New York Times review noted at the time, “has an ebullience and erotic fizz that are often absent” from the Williams-written portions of the book.)
Since then, Oliver Pablo has essentially stopped writing. Damaris’s telling invites us to read his silence as an amalgam of grief and profound skepticism about his privilege: the problem with a certain kind of moral righteousness, particularly when it comes to writing in margins that one doesn’t organically occupy as a white male writer, is that it’s easy to wind up laundering your careerism as altruism without realizing it.
And yet what Damaris seeks from her friend isn’t silence. She’s reaching out, if anything, for help: at her own impasse in writing about Diego, she asks, “I thought perhaps you might like to write this essay with me?”
Oliver Pablo replies to Damaris’s email, attaching a file with the same title as Diego Garcia’s first chapter: “Debt.” Thus, as with many autofictional novels—“the bad kind of autofiction you love to read,” Oliver Pablo says to Damaris—Diego Garcia’s creation is inscribed in the novel itself; but the stakes of that creation are quite different from the reflexivity we’ve come to expect. Collaborative authorship, as opposed to individual authorship, is staged here as a form of mutual aid.
Because if there’s anything uniting us, all of us, Williams and Soobramanien suggest in “Debt,” it’s that atomizing and soul-killing affective state known as the sadness, which is so deadly because it’s so difficult to describe. The sadness is both a fragmenting force and, potentially, an opportunity to articulate one’s personal struggles as shared, political ones. This doesn’t mean that its effects redound equally upon all of us, but it does mean, for worse and for better, that nobody can escape it.
At the end of “Debt,” in the argument that causes Damaris and Oliver Pablo to fall out, she asks him, “Isn’t what caused Diego’s suffering in the end connected to what caused Daniel’s?” To say so—to assert the commensurability of Daniel’s suicide and the suicides of the deported islanders of Diego Garcia; to politicize all of these tragedies as “deaths of despair” deriving from the corrosive logic of racial capitalism—is a risky proposition. And Diego Garcia doesn’t quite say it: Damaris says it, only for Oliver Pablo to respond so scathingly that it nearly destroys their friendship. But of course that’s not the end of the story.
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By the end of the 2010s, many writers associated with autofiction had shifted from first-person narration to third-: Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (2019), Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour (2022), Teju Cole’s Tremor (2024), Rachel Cusk’s Parade (2024). If they retained the first person, it was usually for more traditional purposes: Cusk with Second Place (2021) and even Knausgaard, who returned to his early-career mode of immersive novels dealing with supernatural topics, starting with The Morning Star (2020). There was always an end-of-history portentousness to autofictional novels—My Struggle’s final volume concludes with the declaration “I am no longer a writer”—but it turns out it’s relatively easy to go on, or perhaps to go back. Tao Lin continued writing his distinctive third-person autofiction through 2021’s Leave Society, in which the protagonist reflects on the diminishing returns of the genre but isn’t sure what to do next: “He didn’t want to specialize in embodying and languaging confused alienation anymore, as he had for a decade, writing existential autofiction. He didn’t want to forget that angle either.” Leave Society ultimately plays it both ways; nevertheless, Lin’s next novel will apparently be about aliens.
To the degree that many autofictional authors attempted to solve Sebald’s problem of “wrongful trespass,” it now seems they’ve moved on without having solved it. I’m not sure it can be solved, at least within the scope of a single book. And this is one reason I find Diego Garcia’s experimentalism so compelling: now that the tide has turned back toward realism, now that we can consider autofiction in retrospect, Diego Garcia comes into focus as a high-water mark for the genre. With their weird, unwieldy, largely sui generis response to Sebald, Soobramanien and Williams have pushed the constraints and charms of autofiction back toward the multiplicity of voices associated with polyphonic realism and high modernism. Crucially, though, this is a multiplicity that would seem to satisfy Sebald’s exacting ethical and aesthetic criteria for good books—and perhaps also Walter Benjamin’s criteria for great ones, which “either dissolve a genre or invent one.”
For my part, I’m tempted to coin a name for Diego Garcia’s new literary genre, even if it only applies to one novel at present: “polyautofiction.”
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I came to Diego Garcia because I’ve been writing a collaborative novel of my own, with my friend Peter Myers. I’m not sure whose idea this collaboration was: in late 2018 we started joking over text message about the prevailing sameness of “drony autofiction,” including what I’d been contributing to my MFA workshop; and as the joke escalated, we imagined what would happen if a U.S. Predator drone—a killing machine powered by a sentient AI, developed via some unholy collaboration between the military and Silicon Valley—attempted to write an autofictional novel.
We began to write fifty words each, alternating days, in a shared Google Doc, extruding the text incrementally. What would the machine write about? Well, naturally it would write about the moral dilemma in which it found itself, drawing on what it had learned from “reading” various canonical works of autofiction—as well as, it soon emerged, its handler’s own autofictional novel. What emerged in our Sebaldian effort to reckon with the historical fact of the Forever Wars—and American complicity in them—was a chimerical voice with the intriguing quality of belonging to neither of us, even as it was clearly both of us at once.
We’ve now been at this project for over six years, during which time reality has outstripped many of our wilder speculations. In 2022, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT to the general public; this past March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared the latest model to be “good at creative writing,” and posted an AI-generated “metafictional literary short story about AI and grief” as proof. Meanwhile, the month before, employees at OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon confirmed to the Associated Press that the Israeli military was regularly using commercial AI products from American companies to select bombing targets in Lebanon and Gaza; in one confirmed case, an AI-assisted strike in southern Lebanon mistakenly killed three girls along with their grandmother.
One of Sebald’s gravest insights, which many autofictional authors took to heart, was that humans’ capacity for horrific cruelty tends to beggar the fictive imagination. If you want to engage seriously with that cruelty, it’s hardly necessary to read fiction or write it: just open the newspaper. And when I do—when I encounter these salient facts that I wish were fictions—I’ve taken to sending them to Peter, because some facts are lighter borne if shared. More often than not, these facts make their way into the next batch of fifty words, and the fifty after that, where they begin to drift on the tide of language. This is our rejoinder to Sebald: the affordance of imagined fiction is precisely the leeway not to be constrained to the unadorned, documentary mode, with its insistence on the single truth of what happened.
This is Diego Garcia’s rejoinder, too. To read Diego Garcia is to encounter a collaborative work of art that illustrates what it would ask of us, and what it would offer, to admit that we need one another—that even in our most strident and surefooted accounts of ourselves, the story each of us has to tell is necessarily incomplete.
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On the day his brother died, we’re told, Oliver Pablo was in Brussels. He’d checked Daniel into the mental hospital, then traveled to visit Damaris at a writing residency. There they walk around Brussels’s enormous Palais de Justice, climbing the staircases, “amazed at how much interior space—niches and corners—were formed by its exterior. Some of these areas were curtained off by blankets into rooms. People living there, sleeping on marble.”
The same building is a character of sorts in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the last and most famous of his books, considered by some to be an extended fifth chapter to The Emigrants. The Palace, says the narrator’s sometime friend Jacques Austerlitz, is a “singular architectural monstrosity,” built too hastily and without properly resolving the architect’s unfinished plans, and therefore containing “corridors and stairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority.” In some rumored cases, people have managed to start small businesses “in one or other of the empty rooms and remote corridors of that great warren,” like the apocryphal man who charged passersby a nominal fee to use a street-level bathroom.
It would be technically accurate to accuse all these people—those living in the Palace’s unsupervised nooks or conducting unsanctioned business there—of trespassing. But in considering the irrational, byzantine accumulation of forms that radiate from the dark heart of empire, the only humane perspective may be one that celebrates these ingenious, ramshackle structures of expediency, continuous with yet distinct from the larger edifice, as the affirmations of life that they are.
We’ll never know what kind of novel Sebald would have written next, and whether he, too, had exhausted the solitary first person; his friend and translator Michael Hamburger recalls that “during the last year of his life he would drop only the vaguest of hints about his work.” But in the last months of his life, Sebald did produce a collaborative book with another old friend, the artist Jan Peter Tripp: Unerzählt (Unrecounted), which comprises 33 poems by Sebald and 33 of Tripp’s lithographs, each depicting a pair of eyes.
It has now been more than ten years since Rachel Cusk told an interviewer at the Guardian, “I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” The book Cusk was promoting at the time, her 2014 novel Outline, wasn’t quite autobiography, though neither was it wholly fiction: it was an attempt to reconcile her sense that pure fiction was “fake and embarrassing” with the harsh response to her recent memoirs, which had been so bitter and personal (one subject of 2009’s The Last Supper had sued her). “My mode of autobiography had come to an end,” Cusk explained. “I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry.”
Though neither Cusk nor her interviewer mentioned the word “autofiction,” these quotes quickly became an ambivalent sort of rallying cry for this ascendant literary tendency. Cusk’s words echoed through literary media—the “only form in all the arts” line was repeated in the New Yorker, the New Republic and the Los Angeles Review of Books, to name a few—and therefore among fiction writers, including those in my MFA program, which I entered in August of 2016. Cusk was describing something that seemed to be happening across a small but influential stack of contemporary novels and a much larger corpus of essays about those novels: a moral audit of realist fiction, and of free indirect narration in particular.
Whether the idea disturbed you or not, you had to admit that in the most literal, materialist sense, the polyphonic realisms of the Dickensian social novel and its cousin the Great American Novel were ventriloquism masquerading as true human variety, with one writer hurling his voice in various directions, fabricating a crowd from his isolation. With that in mind, what was to be done? Among my MFA peers, this was a topic of much impassioned debate, both in workshop and at the bar to which we repaired each Thursday after the weekly reading series: Was it the case, both aesthetically and ethically, that a writer had some moral obligation to stick as closely as possible to what he knew? It was a contagious question. In my MFA application’s statement of purpose, I’d proudly listed my influences as Mary Gaitskill, James Salter and Paula Fox; by my second semester I’d submitted to workshop a constipated, largely unparagraphed “remembrance” of college. (“I see you’ve been bitten by the autofiction bug,” one classmate wrote glumly on my manuscript after I switched sides.)
This mode of authorship was tempting, I think, because it offered a budding writer like myself a framework within which writing had clear moral stakes, even if those stakes were defined largely in the negative, as a practice of avoiding harm. And this harm had a name, at least in the private breviary of my brain: the narrative crime that W. G. Sebald calls “wrongful trespass,” the offense of projecting oneself into the unknowable emotional experience of another.
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Early in Sebald’s novel The Emigrants, the writer-narrator learns that his former primary school teacher, Paul Bereyter, has died by suicide. In his grief and shock, the narrator tries “to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like,” though the narrator is most interested in the moments immediately before his teacher’s death. Yet he acknowledges that “such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul” and indeed felt “presumptuous” and shameful. “It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.”11. In the German text of Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), the phrase “wrongful trespass” appears nowhere in the sentence. The closest Sebald gets is a regretful account of “certain excesses of feeling which seem to me inadmissible” (in gewissen Ausuferungen des Gefühls, wie sie mir unzulässig erscheinen), “for the avoidance of which” (zu deren Vermeidung) the narrator has written down what he knows of Paul Bereyter. Despite his bitterly conflicted relationship with his English translator, Michael Hulse, Sebald would have had the final say on the text, so I feel okay about using the phrase throughout this essay. Sebald’s statement of humility is also an ethic: “I have written down what I know” can be read as “I have written down only what I know.”
You can trace Sebald’s influence across the generic corpus of contemporary autofiction: this cautious self-reflexivity, the self-doubt so profound that the narrator is often reduced to silence. A defining generic trope of the autofictional novel is the Sebaldian moment when the sheer rottenness of trespassing upon the minds of friends and strangers leaves the writer-narrator so disgusted that conventional novelistic form must be renounced. Whether born of an ethical impulse or not, this renunciation is what distinguishes autofiction from autobiographical fiction or metafiction, as Christian Lorentzen has argued: to the degree that “autofiction” is a helpful term, it’s in naming the genre’s special emphasis on “the narrator’s … status as a writer or artist,” such that “the book’s creation is inscribed in the book itself,” forsaking “literary realism” in favor of the real.
Many autofictional authors of the 2010s regularly borrowed Sebald’s favorite strategies for destabilizing the writer-narrator’s authority: checking their accounts against hard externals and performing doubt about the error or insufficiency of their own interpretations. There are the grayscale photos of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011); the pivotally unreliable memory of Teju Cole’s narrator in Open City (2011); Garth Greenwell’s unparagraphed, objective-correlative exploration of an abandoned quarry, in the middle section of What Belongs to You (2016), as a means of excavating the compacted strata of one’s own trauma and one’s own culpability in the pain of others; and the garrulous interlocutors of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014-2018), whose extended monologues make the writer-protagonist less a narrator than a tacit recipient of others’ narrations.
These novels do contain beauty and pleasure, but to me they feel overcast with loneliness, as well as a self-recriminating anger, which suggests that the righteous abandonment of allofiction for autofiction doesn’t solve one’s writerly problems. The world remains fractured, the dead stay dead, and beneath it all, you’re alone. To write while observing such an ethical program is a demanding vocation; Sebald told his graduate creative writing students as much, reportedly, at their first meeting in the fall semester of 2001, his last before his death in December of that year. “Being always on your own,” Sebald said, “with your own thoughts, trying to make sense of them, being forced to constantly invent things—is this not a recipe for mental ruin?”
Despite Sebald’s warnings, many younger novelists have followed his path, though few have pursued his ethical program with the idiosyncratic rigor of Luke Williams, a former student of Sebald’s who recorded the above recollection in a 2011 essay, and his classmate Natasha Soobramanien. Their collaborative novel Diego Garcia, published in 2022 by Fitzcarraldo and Semiotext(e), imagines an alternative aesthetic solution to the problem of “wrongful trespass.” If a writer is necessarily constrained by the limits of his own subjectivity, they expand that subjectivity at the source: they write with two heads instead of one.
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We know Diego Garcia is fiction because the title page says “a novel”; and we know it’s not quite, because the authors’ note on the next page begins, “At the heart of this novel are two real events.”
The first of those events involves the decolonization of Mauritius. When Mauritius gained independence from Britain in 1968, Britain insisted upon retaining control of a group of Mauritian islands known as the Chagos Archipelago, and then leased the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States. This, we now know, had been the plan all along: the U.S. had struck a deal for “exclusive control” of Diego Garcia in order to build a strategically important military base there. This deal stipulated that the island be furnished “without local inhabitants,” and so between 1968 and 1973, the British government forcibly deported around 2,000 Chagossians from Diego Garcia, with support from the U.S. At first, British officials simply refused to let islanders return if they left for vacation or medical treatment, and then they restricted shipments of food and medicine, hoping that the islanders would leave autonomously if not quite voluntarily. Finally, in 1971, the British began deliberately terrorizing the islanders by killing their dogs in improvised gas chambers. British officers forced the remaining islanders onto crowded cargo ships, sent them to Mauritius or the Seychelles—in some cases separating families—and abandoned them to their fate.22. In October 2024, the U.K. agreed to return sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, on the condition of maintaining a 99-year lease of Diego Garcia, which the U.K. and U.S. will continue to use as a joint military base. In the past two months, the Pentagon has deployed ten heavy bombers to Diego Garcia.
You have to read a while before it becomes clear that Natasha Soobramanien’s fictive avatar is of partial Mauritian descent, like her author. Still later, we learn that the second “real event” alluded to in the authors’ note is the suicide of Luke Williams’s brother, whose fictive counterpart the authors call Daniel.
The setting is Edinburgh, 2014. Two friends named Damaris and Oliver Pablo, each with one published novel, both deeply in debt, are spending the summer alone together. They wander the city. They get drunk. They argue for no particular reason and spend a few hours apart, which are rendered in two parallel columns of text. They reconcile, they hug: “Her/his shoulder/neck felt warm against his/her neck/shoulder.” They never quite make it to the library, where they’ve been trying to write… what, exactly? A malaise, which they call simply the sadness, has leached them both of purpose.
They meet a homeless, undocumented man who calls himself Diego, who explains that he’s descended from the Chagossians of Diego Garcia; Damaris records his narrative on her phone. After a night of carousing with the narrators, Diego disappears, leaving behind his many suitcases, which the narrators try unsuccessfully to return to him.
As a substitute, and for lack of anything better to do, they begin researching Diego Garcia. Their narrative becomes interleaved with shot descriptions from the 2011 documentary Chagos ou la mémoire des îles, which follows a group of Chagossians on a supervised visit back to the archipelago. These film clips—which, to be clear, are real—deliver the most wrenching parts of the Chagossians’ story, without commentary or embellishment. One displaced islander explains that when the British killed the islanders’ dogs, they made them herd their own companions to be gassed. Had the British officers tried it themselves, the dogs would have bitten them.
The Chagossian dialect has its own term for that heartbreak, which the novel uses repeatedly: sagren, “an emotional-existential shock” that refers specifically to the deaths of despair that occurred during or because of the deportations.
“Sagren” is left untranslated but unitalicized: it is not flagged as a foreign word floating amid recognizable English, but brought into the language as a word for a concept that hasn’t yet been named. Nor is sagren equated to the sadness, though it’s clearly derived from the French chagrin, meaning “sadness” or “sorrow.”
The question of whether these words are commensurable, if not quite equivalent, hangs over the whole novel. How can anyone write about profound losses, whether historical or personal, that are not their own? To this very Sebaldian question they add another: If no single voice can do justice to these traumas, is it possible that more than one could?
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To these ethical quandaries, Diego Garcia proposes some aesthetic solutions. The novel is written in an unusual narrative voice, a hybrid of its two writer-protagonists’. It is an idiolect closely resembling British English, dense with inside jokes and jargon (the words “book” and “cigarette” are only ever called “block” and “tube,” respectively, abstracting the objects to their essential geometric forms), and particularly reliant on unconventional pronouns that locate the narration somewhere between first-person plural and free indirect discourse:
But the unity eventually breaks down. After Diego disappears, Damaris decides to write about him. At first, she simply translates Diego’s story from Mauritian Kreol, but then she decides to fictionalize it—to “rewrite what Diego had said but as she imagined Diego’s sister Rose might have told it.” It’s up to us to decide whether Damaris’s story, “Garde,” is an expression of solidarity or wrongful trespass, because in addition to drawing from Diego’s testimony, Damaris is clearly writing about Daniel, Oliver Pablo’s late brother, projecting onto Diego’s life details from Daniel’s, from his job as a museum guard and his time squatting in abandoned buildings to his commitment to a mental hospital. In Damaris’s story, Diego checks himself out, just like Daniel did, and takes his own life.
Oliver Pablo takes umbrage at this characterization. He’s most offended, strangely, by the notion that Diego could have talked his way out of the mental hospital, as Daniel did: “they would not have let Diego out,” Oliver Pablo says, on account of his race and class. But it’s clear that Oliver Pablo’s anger is rooted more in grief than in Damaris’s insufficient grasp of white privilege: “You could have imagined a future for him. It’s just a story she says. Yes but not yours. Diego could be anywhere. He is alive, I know it.” Neither of them can manage to find the right words to describe what happened—to Diego and Daniel and, of course, to themselves, in the wake of these losses.
When the narrative picks up again, it’s 2020. Six years have passed, and the novel’s form has reinvented itself: we’re reading an email from Damaris to Oliver Pablo. She’s living in Brussels, where she’s still “trying and failing” to make something of Diego’s story.
“I guess I am wondering,” she writes, “why you and I felt—I still feel—so compelled to engage with this story as writers. How as a writer do you tell a story that needs to be shared, if it is not your story?”
She’s attached to her email a new story titled “NOTES FOR ‘GARDE’, OR HOW WE BECAME A WRITER.” This text may be Damaris’s take on the Sebaldian moment in which a writer-narrator swears off fiction in favor of fact, but it’s at least as much about Oliver Pablo’s history of presumptuous trespass as her own.
Oliver Pablo, Damaris recalls, had been drawn to writing for the commendable purpose of wanting to give a voice to the voiceless. To do so, he’d applied to a prestigious graduate creative writing program (similar to how Williams and Soobramanien met in the M.A. program at the University of East Anglia, where they studied with Sebald). But this is not the story of how we became writers, plural, a rousing tale of two frenemies whose collegial rivalry spurs both of them to new creative heights. No, it’s “how we became a writer,” singular, and told with the tough love for which we rely on our true friends.
The simple truth is that Oliver Pablo was overwhelmed by getting exactly what he wanted. After signing with “the most famous agency in the world” and taking a book deal with “the best publisher in London,” he was unable to finish his manuscript, and found himself two years past his deadline, his advance completely gone, in a state of desperation.
The solution was a practical one that only later attained the fullness of its biographical, aesthetic and ethical significance: Damaris offered to help Oliver Pablo finish the novel. She wrote two chapters for him, diary entries by the protagonist’s former lover, precisely as Soobramanien actually did for Williams’s 2011 debut The Echo Chamber. (In the actual novel, this character’s name was Damaris; Damaris’s diary, the New York Times review noted at the time, “has an ebullience and erotic fizz that are often absent” from the Williams-written portions of the book.)
Since then, Oliver Pablo has essentially stopped writing. Damaris’s telling invites us to read his silence as an amalgam of grief and profound skepticism about his privilege: the problem with a certain kind of moral righteousness, particularly when it comes to writing in margins that one doesn’t organically occupy as a white male writer, is that it’s easy to wind up laundering your careerism as altruism without realizing it.
And yet what Damaris seeks from her friend isn’t silence. She’s reaching out, if anything, for help: at her own impasse in writing about Diego, she asks, “I thought perhaps you might like to write this essay with me?”
Oliver Pablo replies to Damaris’s email, attaching a file with the same title as Diego Garcia’s first chapter: “Debt.” Thus, as with many autofictional novels—“the bad kind of autofiction you love to read,” Oliver Pablo says to Damaris—Diego Garcia’s creation is inscribed in the novel itself; but the stakes of that creation are quite different from the reflexivity we’ve come to expect. Collaborative authorship, as opposed to individual authorship, is staged here as a form of mutual aid.
Because if there’s anything uniting us, all of us, Williams and Soobramanien suggest in “Debt,” it’s that atomizing and soul-killing affective state known as the sadness, which is so deadly because it’s so difficult to describe. The sadness is both a fragmenting force and, potentially, an opportunity to articulate one’s personal struggles as shared, political ones. This doesn’t mean that its effects redound equally upon all of us, but it does mean, for worse and for better, that nobody can escape it.
At the end of “Debt,” in the argument that causes Damaris and Oliver Pablo to fall out, she asks him, “Isn’t what caused Diego’s suffering in the end connected to what caused Daniel’s?” To say so—to assert the commensurability of Daniel’s suicide and the suicides of the deported islanders of Diego Garcia; to politicize all of these tragedies as “deaths of despair” deriving from the corrosive logic of racial capitalism—is a risky proposition. And Diego Garcia doesn’t quite say it: Damaris says it, only for Oliver Pablo to respond so scathingly that it nearly destroys their friendship. But of course that’s not the end of the story.
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By the end of the 2010s, many writers associated with autofiction had shifted from first-person narration to third-: Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (2019), Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour (2022), Teju Cole’s Tremor (2024), Rachel Cusk’s Parade (2024). If they retained the first person, it was usually for more traditional purposes: Cusk with Second Place (2021) and even Knausgaard, who returned to his early-career mode of immersive novels dealing with supernatural topics, starting with The Morning Star (2020). There was always an end-of-history portentousness to autofictional novels—My Struggle’s final volume concludes with the declaration “I am no longer a writer”—but it turns out it’s relatively easy to go on, or perhaps to go back. Tao Lin continued writing his distinctive third-person autofiction through 2021’s Leave Society, in which the protagonist reflects on the diminishing returns of the genre but isn’t sure what to do next: “He didn’t want to specialize in embodying and languaging confused alienation anymore, as he had for a decade, writing existential autofiction. He didn’t want to forget that angle either.” Leave Society ultimately plays it both ways; nevertheless, Lin’s next novel will apparently be about aliens.
To the degree that many autofictional authors attempted to solve Sebald’s problem of “wrongful trespass,” it now seems they’ve moved on without having solved it. I’m not sure it can be solved, at least within the scope of a single book. And this is one reason I find Diego Garcia’s experimentalism so compelling: now that the tide has turned back toward realism, now that we can consider autofiction in retrospect, Diego Garcia comes into focus as a high-water mark for the genre. With their weird, unwieldy, largely sui generis response to Sebald, Soobramanien and Williams have pushed the constraints and charms of autofiction back toward the multiplicity of voices associated with polyphonic realism and high modernism. Crucially, though, this is a multiplicity that would seem to satisfy Sebald’s exacting ethical and aesthetic criteria for good books—and perhaps also Walter Benjamin’s criteria for great ones, which “either dissolve a genre or invent one.”
For my part, I’m tempted to coin a name for Diego Garcia’s new literary genre, even if it only applies to one novel at present: “polyautofiction.”
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I came to Diego Garcia because I’ve been writing a collaborative novel of my own, with my friend Peter Myers. I’m not sure whose idea this collaboration was: in late 2018 we started joking over text message about the prevailing sameness of “drony autofiction,” including what I’d been contributing to my MFA workshop; and as the joke escalated, we imagined what would happen if a U.S. Predator drone—a killing machine powered by a sentient AI, developed via some unholy collaboration between the military and Silicon Valley—attempted to write an autofictional novel.
We began to write fifty words each, alternating days, in a shared Google Doc, extruding the text incrementally. What would the machine write about? Well, naturally it would write about the moral dilemma in which it found itself, drawing on what it had learned from “reading” various canonical works of autofiction—as well as, it soon emerged, its handler’s own autofictional novel. What emerged in our Sebaldian effort to reckon with the historical fact of the Forever Wars—and American complicity in them—was a chimerical voice with the intriguing quality of belonging to neither of us, even as it was clearly both of us at once.
We’ve now been at this project for over six years, during which time reality has outstripped many of our wilder speculations. In 2022, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT to the general public; this past March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared the latest model to be “good at creative writing,” and posted an AI-generated “metafictional literary short story about AI and grief” as proof. Meanwhile, the month before, employees at OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon confirmed to the Associated Press that the Israeli military was regularly using commercial AI products from American companies to select bombing targets in Lebanon and Gaza; in one confirmed case, an AI-assisted strike in southern Lebanon mistakenly killed three girls along with their grandmother.
One of Sebald’s gravest insights, which many autofictional authors took to heart, was that humans’ capacity for horrific cruelty tends to beggar the fictive imagination. If you want to engage seriously with that cruelty, it’s hardly necessary to read fiction or write it: just open the newspaper. And when I do—when I encounter these salient facts that I wish were fictions—I’ve taken to sending them to Peter, because some facts are lighter borne if shared. More often than not, these facts make their way into the next batch of fifty words, and the fifty after that, where they begin to drift on the tide of language. This is our rejoinder to Sebald: the affordance of imagined fiction is precisely the leeway not to be constrained to the unadorned, documentary mode, with its insistence on the single truth of what happened.
This is Diego Garcia’s rejoinder, too. To read Diego Garcia is to encounter a collaborative work of art that illustrates what it would ask of us, and what it would offer, to admit that we need one another—that even in our most strident and surefooted accounts of ourselves, the story each of us has to tell is necessarily incomplete.
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On the day his brother died, we’re told, Oliver Pablo was in Brussels. He’d checked Daniel into the mental hospital, then traveled to visit Damaris at a writing residency. There they walk around Brussels’s enormous Palais de Justice, climbing the staircases, “amazed at how much interior space—niches and corners—were formed by its exterior. Some of these areas were curtained off by blankets into rooms. People living there, sleeping on marble.”
The same building is a character of sorts in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the last and most famous of his books, considered by some to be an extended fifth chapter to The Emigrants. The Palace, says the narrator’s sometime friend Jacques Austerlitz, is a “singular architectural monstrosity,” built too hastily and without properly resolving the architect’s unfinished plans, and therefore containing “corridors and stairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority.” In some rumored cases, people have managed to start small businesses “in one or other of the empty rooms and remote corridors of that great warren,” like the apocryphal man who charged passersby a nominal fee to use a street-level bathroom.
It would be technically accurate to accuse all these people—those living in the Palace’s unsupervised nooks or conducting unsanctioned business there—of trespassing. But in considering the irrational, byzantine accumulation of forms that radiate from the dark heart of empire, the only humane perspective may be one that celebrates these ingenious, ramshackle structures of expediency, continuous with yet distinct from the larger edifice, as the affirmations of life that they are.
We’ll never know what kind of novel Sebald would have written next, and whether he, too, had exhausted the solitary first person; his friend and translator Michael Hamburger recalls that “during the last year of his life he would drop only the vaguest of hints about his work.” But in the last months of his life, Sebald did produce a collaborative book with another old friend, the artist Jan Peter Tripp: Unerzählt (Unrecounted), which comprises 33 poems by Sebald and 33 of Tripp’s lithographs, each depicting a pair of eyes.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.