Fictography is a new literary term I stumbled across, and as near as I can tell, it's a fictionalized biography. There's also an auto fictography, which means you wrote it yourself but makes it sound like you do TOO many things by yourself, so I'd just stick with fictography. I imagine an author would choose to write a fictography instead of a memoir when they wanted to sensationalize their life stories. That's what James Frey did, apparently, and if he'd just called it fictography instead of memoir, he would have sold a bazillion less copies and gotten to stay out of Oprah's spanking machine.
An author would also want to write a fictography if she wanted to promise her reader the edginess of memoir but still be able to hide behind the veil of fiction if her life story was too edgy. Another literary term for that genre might be the chickenshitography. I'm writing one now, and I've got about sixty pages. It's tentatively titled Free as a Ghost and is about a woman's experiences after her husband commits suicide. It's tabled as I edit June Bug and write Knee High by July, but I keep going back to it. Watch for me hawking my chickenshitography in about three years.
Hello Jane,
ReplyDeleteI am the person who invented the term 'Fictograpjhy' When I was writing my Ph. D thesis I needed a word to describe what happened when authors 'cannibalized' different discourses and implicated themselves in narratives which playfully explored the interstices between fact and fiction.
My thesis can be accesssed by contacting John Rylands University , Manchester and seeking out 'Fictography and Self-Invention in the works of Philip Roth and Maxine Hong Kingston'
Best wishes,
Dr. D. Williams